Double Exposures

                      -from Errors in the Script

The Double Exposure is a form in which one poem can be read three different ways: solely the standard type, solely the bold type in alternating lines, or the combination of the two.

In an interview with Smartish Pace, Greg described the form this way:

When I’d first written a few Double Exposures, I was reminded by a friend that I’d floated an idea like it back in school. I liked the notion of having this text on the page that interleaves and changes depending on how you look at it. But I never thought of an unhokey way of doing it. One day, years later, I was thinking about the effects of this photographic double exposure, and I thought I’d give it a shot. I figured it ought to be about 3×5, and I wanted the third, combined reading to bring the other two together into a complexified, and generally darker, coexistence.

Read examples of Double Exposures: Medical School Skeleton With Domino’s Pizza Man and Anne Dancing with Skeleton at PoetryFoundation.org

Sonnets

     –from A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck

White

“Only when we kick the habit of mind
Which sees in pictures little corners of nature,
Madonnas, shameless Venuses shall we find
A work of living art,” saith the lecture,

And you, the hack, the scribbler, with your dumb grin
Of sentiment, sign, self, the vulgar heart
Of content, tint, text, were complicit in
The well-patinaed, off-white lies of art

Until, in your clean (last) white shirt so chic
Down here, through reams of winters, you pursue
Your final undertaking, to ghostwrite,
In air, a palimpsest of pure technique,
Stripped of allusion, mediation, you:
Moonlight on Snow with Wind in White

on White.

---

Taco

In poems, the line of demarcation
That separates refined aesthete from cretin
Is that above which there can be no tacos, one
Does not eat tacos, tacos will not be eaten,

But, fastened to a dying animal,
You’re made of taco, fear you are it, a metrist
Whose range transcends not taco, a shell
Of a man, a maize, a latterday taco belle lettrist,

Until you cant the old sombrero for
A well-deserved siesta, the dingaling
Now lionized, the ragamuffin, cock o’
The walk, with your proleptic metaphor:
A taco of gold and gold enameling,
A fulgent, gong-tormented, gilt
Ur-taco.

---

DNA

If Natural Selection “rigidly
Destroys injurious variation” in
The complex codes of A, G, C, and T,
How’s Darwin gonna splain the Windsor Chin…

Or you(!), the Afterthought, the Also-Ran
In life’s genetic bouillabaisse—six-fingered,
Stared at, touched with ten-foot poles—who began
In “Last,” lost ground, gave into, and malingered

Until the babbling replications cave
And you start talking, garrulously, turkey—
The ABC’s of FUBAR, T&A
IMHO—and taking to the grave
The only extant copy of your quirky,
Rare, self-mocking, murderous
DNA?