My Wife Reads the Paper at Breakfast on the Birthday of the Scottish Poet
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Miller Williams illustration.
When your father dies
have notes
somewhere inside.
-- Miller Williams, "Permit Me Tell You lot"
Photograph by Democrat-Gazette file photograph
Miller Williams, the noted Arkansas poet, in his office in 2008 at the Academy of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Photo by Democrat-Gazette file photo
Miller Williams (right) greets Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2007 in Fayetteville equally Bob Beasom and Lynn Wade scout.
Photograph by RACHEL CHANEY / Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, daughter of poet Miller Williams, attended a reception in Little Rock when he received the Lifetime Accomplishment Porter Prize in 2009.
The above line comes from a poem in which Arkansas poet Miller Williams urged us to brand use of whatsoever was at hand, including the dying of a friend.
Williams was my beloved friend. He died in Fayetteville on Jan. 1. He was 84 years onetime.
I was asked by his widow to write an obituary. This is my attempt to honour that request, and to make use of Miller's dying the best I tin can.
I think of obituaries as an act of journalism designed to put the community on notice, a quasi-official inverted-pyramid story to exist read over 1's forenoon coffee. An obituary provides facts and, peradventure, if in that location is space and time enough, the reporter might share an chestnut or a quote from someone who knew the deceased, designed to give a tender glimpse into the person'south graphic symbol.
I wish I could turn out a deft and compact synopsis and appreciation of the great man's life, and perchance leave you with a bemused grinning, only I am struggling to invert Miller's pyramid.
More this black thicket of text, Miller Williams deserves an edifice -- or a city. Some monument that might survive the blighted centuries to come.
He might disagree with that and remind me of Shelley's "Ozymandias." Miller was a scientist; he understood the odds favored existential ice over rapturous fire and, while we might exist delighted by any prizes we collect in this life, they are ultimately vanities. He had a great sense of humor about this. Here's the entirety of his poem "My Married woman Reads the Paper at Breakfast on the Birthday of the Scottish Poet":
Poet Burns to Be Honored, the headline read.
She put it downwardly. "They found yous out," she said.
The get-go few lines of the conventional obituary would annotation that he read his occasional verse form "Of History and Hope" at President Bill Clinton'due south 2nd inauguration in 1997. That Miller was the co-founder of the Academy of Arkansas Press, which he directed for 17 years, and of the university'southward Master of Fine Arts in literary translation program and was instrumental in the shaping of its MFA in creative writing program. It would annotation that he was married to Jordan, his married woman since 1969; that he was the father of three children -- singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, Robert and Karyn -- and a grandfather and a great-grandfather.
Over the years he published more 40 books, collections of poesy, translations of strange poets' work, textbooks and even -- with James A. McPherson -- a history of America'southward railroads. Maybe the obit would
mention his 1952 meeting with Hank Williams in Lake Charles, La., an occasion on which the singer advised the poet to "drink beer."
After he told me that story, I teasingly referred to Miller as "The Hank Williams of American Poetry" every time I mentioned him in print. It pleased him, just there is truth in information technology. Miller'south plainsong had the same tough honesty as Hank's vox; the aforementioned uncommon sensitivity to the extraordinary experience bachelor to ordinary people. On the other manus, I don't remember Miller every bit much of a beer drinker -- his especial fondness was for Woodbridge Chardonnay, which we poured from 1.5-liter bottles.
...
Miller was built-in in Hoxie, and was one of half-dozen children. His male parent, E.B., was a Methodist preacher, an early on integrationist who sought to organize sharecroppers in the Southern Tenant Farmers' Matrimony. The Williams family moved about Arkansas ofttimes -- to Fort Smith, Booneville, Paragould and Russellville. Miller began writing early and found himself peculiarly drawn to poetry. But later on he entered Hendrix College in Conway, a counselor put him on a dissimilar path.
"A psychological evaluation indicated I had no exact aptitude," he said. "I was told I'd embarrass myself and my family unit."
So he went into science. He studied hard and well and ended upwards doing graduate piece of work in zoology, instruction high school and higher biology. He married immature, had a family and went to work selling appliances for Sears and higher textbooks out of his car'southward trunk. But he always wrote poetry.
In 1950, education biology at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., Miller hosted a poetry testify on television (can you imagine such a matter these days?) and had poems published in The New York Times. He thought he might live out his life every bit a scientist/poet, balancing vocation and avocation similar pediatrician William Carlos Williams or novelist Walker Percy, who was trained as a physician.
But in 1961 he met John Ciardi, the poet who would become his friend and mentor. Ciardi invited Miller to the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. There Williams met Robert Frost and discovered a kind of customs of poets he had suspected existed but had never before encountered. The side by side yr, Miller joined the faculty of Louisiana Land University at Baton Rouge -- as an English language professor.
His poems remain shot through with science. His preparation has lent his work a kind of epistemological skepticism -- a distrust of finality that nonetheless acknowledges the role faith plays in human pursuits. His 2007 verse form "After All These Years of Prayer and Pi R Foursquare" illuminates his synthesis of these two seemingly antithetical paths of intellectual striving:
How sugariness a defoliation that science, that creed of the animal,
that earthly philosophy of numbers in motion,
distrusted past rabbi, sheik, and preacher
who take clothed its nakedness in flame,
should quietly introduce usa to the notion
of something weightless within us wanting a proper name
...
Whatever conventional obituary of Miller would necessarily include a representative, though probably non inclusive, listing of the honors he was accorded, including the Prix de Rome for Literature from the American University of Arts and Letters, Harvard'south Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship for poetry, the New York Arts Fund Award for Pregnant Contribution to American Messages, the Henry Bellaman Verse Prize, the Charity Randall Citation for Contribution to Poetry as a Spoken Art, the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence and the Academy Accolade for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been named Socio Benemerito dell'Associazione of the Centro Romanesco Trilussa in Rome. In 1990, he won the prestigious Poet's Prize.
But you lot don't measure out a man by the prizes he wins, for there are all sorts of reasons people win (and fail to win) prizes. People who live in Arkansas know their accomplishments are by and large discounted past the people who alive in our country's coastal cultural centers and by their own neighbors, who are given to wondering why, if you're so adept, why are you still here?
A good obit author would note Miller lived all over the world and spoke a half-dozen languages or more (including Esperanto), yet he spent most of his life in the country where he was born. There were prizes that Miller did not win, and I asked him about them. I of the things that people who live in Arkansas know is that in that location is a price to be paid for living here.
"I call up of myself as an Arkansawyer, just non an Arkansas poet," Miller used to say. "I would rather live in Arkansas than win whatsoever prize on earth."
Miller could say this because he had the adventure to travel and a not inconsiderable part of the world wound up passing through his orbit. He served as visiting professor of U.S. literature at the Academy of Chile and Fulbright professor of American studies at the University of Mexico. For 7 years he was a member of the verse kinesthesia at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He represented the U.Southward. Land Department on reading and lecturing tours through Latin America, Europe, the Centre East and the Far E. He published stories, translations, poems and critical essays in virtually of the seminal journals and mass circulation magazines in the U.s.a. and many in Canada, Latin America and Europe. His poems have been translated into many languages; he translated Pablo Neruda into English language.
...
The walls of Miller's Fayetteville home were splashed with photographs and paintings, with a story fastened to every one. He had a lot of friends, many of them celebrated.
He rode on tour buses with Johnny Greenbacks and Tom T. Hall. During the civil rights era, as marchers were on their fashion to participate in demonstrations in Selma, Ala., Miller participated in diner sit-ins with George Haley -- the sometime administrator to Somalia under Bill Clinton and blood brother of Roots author Alex and one of the kickoff black constabulary students admitted into the University of Arkansas.
He knew Flannery O'Connor, C.D. Wright, Maya Angelou, Frank Stanford and Howard Nemerov. I remember him talking about the time he and Jordan spent the night dancing with Ciardi and his wife at Ralph Ellison's apartment in Harlem, and how Ellison insisted on walking the four of them to their car considering he didn't want iv white friends on the Harlem streets after midnight without a black presence to vouch for them.
He saw Eudora Welty at a reception in New York.
"Anybody else was dressed for Sunday morning church, and she was in a wash-clothes and a shapeless cardigan sweater with what seemed to be kitchen slippers," Miller recalled. "And she was treated with such awesome respect by everyone that all of united states of america felt terribly overdressed."
"I don't know of any poet who can express more clearly and beautifully the humorous and serious thoughts of this modern earth," former President Jimmy Carter, who counted Miller as a mentor, told me in 2001.
"I have always had a kind of frustration near not having had an adequate liberal arts instruction," Carter said. "Then I've tried to brand upwardly for it by studying and writing myself. Maybe ten years agone I had written a few poems, not even proficient enough for me to desire to bear witness them to anybody in my family. And Miller Williams came downwards to Plains, I got to know him and I told him that I would really love to learn more well-nigh poetry. In effect he took me under his wing as a educatee and was a very tough taskmaster in assigning me the same kind of literary textbooks he used in college courses. I began to struggle with poesy so."
Carter spent thousands of hours over an eight-year menses writing what became his first volume of poems, Always a Reckoning.
"The wonderful affair that I had with Miller was that he could tell me that a line or a word was inferior, but I never permit him give me a give-and-take instead," Carter said. "That was the deal we had and I stuck with it. So he would say, 'This line has an artificial rhyme and you're straining to say something.' He would recognize it, and and so I would effort to correct it."
The obituary would not note that I was as well one of Miller'due south padawans. He taught me, as surely as he taught all those students that passed through the UA writing programme. He used to tell me that Ciardi used to tell him that poetry was the art of lying 1'due south way to the truth, which is a useful idea. Simply I adopt Miller's own working definition of poetry as the apply of language to communicate more than the words seem to say in such a way that the reader cannot help simply be pulled into the conspiracy of cosmos. Miller'southward poems give vocalism to our inchoate thoughts.
...
Miller once told me that, when he became (briefly unquestionably) famous later reading his poem at the Clinton inauguration, he was recognized in a drugstore by a threescore-ish man. "Are you lot Miller Williams?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," he responded.
"Well, I just wanted you to know I didn't lookout man the inauguration -- I'k a Republican man of affairs -- but I read near yous and your poem in The Wall Street Journal. I was skeptical, simply the poem was there so I read it. Well, I want to tell you lot, I took it home with me at noon that day, and I said to my wife, 'Honey, I understood a poem.'"
"Sir," Miller said, "I'd rather hear that from you than from a hundred English professors."
Miller'south poems are synthetic of obviously words; they aren't obscure or cryptic. They mean what they say.
"It is almost inexpressibly important to me that my poesy be accessible to anyone who cares to read poetry, any their station in life, whatsoever their background," he said. "At the aforementioned time, I want to write poesy that acquits itself equally serious poetry to those in an academic position to make that judgment."
A few years ago, for a program on Miller that ran on AETN, announcer Ernie Dumas asked Miller what he'd like his legacy to exist.
"Professionally, apart from my children and their children, I would want to accept my poetry read and appreciated -- on paper every bit long every bit there are words on paper," Miller said. "It would make me very happy on my deathbed to believe that in a one thousand years someone would actually open up a book and read one of my poems."
That would be monument plenty.
The family of Miller Williams requests that memorials be sent to:
The Miller Williams Verse Series, University of Arkansas Press, McIlroy House, 105 Due north. McIlroy Ave., Fayetteville, Ark. 72701 or The Harrison/Whitehead endowment, Fayetteville Community Foundation, P.O. Box 997, Fayetteville, Ark. 72702
Email:
[email protected]
Style on 01/11/2015
Source: https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2015/jan/11/miller-williams-pyramid-20150111/
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