OCCASIONAL POETRY is written to celebrate a particular occasion, such as a marriage (epithalamion, epithalamium, prothalamion), death (elegy, obsequy, ode, threnody), public event (triumphal ode, coronation ode) or person (encomium, pæan, panegyric), or to deliver an apology (palinode). The genethliacum is an occasional poem written in honor of a birth. It may be written in any prosody or in any form, traditional or nonce. This genethliacum is written in the strong-stress prosody called “podics”; many ballads and nursery rhymes are written in podics -- for more information about this system, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition.
NURSERY RIME
What shall I say of my son,
That he is firm, fair of skin?
That he rides his backside and can't know
He has not yet let the outside in?
There squalls a storm just begun.
I stand fast; he lies low.
What may I say of this bone
Wound in flesh partly mine —
Warp of my woof, thread of my skein —
He has come so supple to sup and dine,
To tangle the nets we have thrown
To veil the waters that won't drain.
He would swim where I recline.
Toss him a hook. Fish his schools:
He will lure us down, take us in.
He will build us a weir for fools —
He is no man's yet he is mine.
He is a death sign and a bulletin.
These next two genethliacums are written in the traditional roundelay form invented by John Dryden in the 18th century:
FOR CHRISTOPHER CAMERON TURCO
A Roundelay after Dryden, January 23, 1997
Christopher is twenty-four
Upon this January morn.
It makes his father pretty sore,
It leaves his mother looking worn
That they don't see him anymore
Because he's left where he was born:
It makes his father pretty sore,
It leaves his mother looking worn.
His sister's settled their old score —
Their sibling feud has been forsworn,
But they don't see him anymore
Because he's left where he was born.
His sister's settled their old score;
Their sibling feud has been forsworn.
It makes his father pretty sore,
It leaves his mother looking worn
That they don't see him anymore
Now Chris has left where he was born.
His family can but deplore
The way its fabric has been torn.
Christopher is twenty-four
Upon this January morn,
But they don't see him anymore
Since he forsook where he was born.
FOR JESSIMA SITI RANNEY
A Roundelay after Dryden, January 23, 1997
Jessima is one year old
On this January day.
Yes, the weather's pretty cold,
But we feel as warm as May;
Her father loves her big and bold,
Her mother loves her all the way —
Yes, the weather's pretty cold,
But we feel as warm as May:
Grandma will not break her hold,
Granddad's on the floor to play;
Her father loves her big and bold,
Her mother loves her all the way.
Grandma will not break her hold,
Granddad's on the floor to play —
Yes, the weather's pretty cold,
But we feel as warm as May:
Her father loves her big and bold,
Her mother loves her all the way —
Oh, the stories to be told!
Oh, the songs to sing and say!
Jessima’s a whole year old
On this cold and blowy day.
Her father loves her big and bold,
And mother loves her all the way.
These three genethliacums are written in the verse form called the rubliw which was invented by Richard Wilbur in the 20th century:
RUBLIW FOR HAMLET ON HIS 400TH BIRTHDAY
Dear Ham,
I guess I am
just about as damn
full of you as any clam
is full of stuffing. I simply cannot cram
you down past my diaphragm —
not another gram.
I wish you’d scram,
you ham!
RUBLIW FOR MARGARET GROUT
On Her 100th Birthday.
Dear Mar-
garet, you are
without doubt, by far
a century’s most shining star.
independent of the calendar,
here is a ringing reservoir
of lovesong poured afar
from an Alcazar
guitar.
RUBLIW FOR GEORGE O’CONNELL
On His Birthday, 16 October 2000
Dear George,
It would be gorg-
eous to do as the Borg-
ias did and take a meal to gorge
us all on your birthday. It will forge
a closer bond among us four
“jest folks.” Who could want more,
George? Be food’s scourge —
engorge!
This birthday poem is written in the traditional form called common octave, which is the quatrain stanza called common measure doubled:
GENETHLIACUM FOR GEORGE O’CONNELL
October 16, 2012
George’s birthday is this week,
He’s turning eighty-six.
I doubt I could administer
Half that many licks,
Or light that many candles on
A largish birthday cake
Before we’d all be standing in
A waxen burning lake.
So I am simply going to
Write these simple rhymes
And wish him well and many more --
Okay, A few more times
Like this one where we four have come
Together for a sharing
Of a meal, a drink, a laugh,
And a ritual of caring.
This poem is written in iambic tetrameter lines, most of which are couplets, called “short couplets,” but not all of them:
A GENETHLIACUM FOR GARY GETCHELL
November 20, 1995
Gary Getchell’s turning seventy –
It seems more like a thousand-leventy.
His father, Ray, was a restless itch,
Which makes Gary a son-of-an-itch.
Jean, my wife, held her cousin in awe,
And I, his ancient cousin-in-law
Have had to swallow an incredible crawful
Over the years, so I do what’s in-lawful
And hold that he’s just somebody awful
Nice when he’s not feeling above it,
Which isn’t often, so I tell him to shove it
Into a corner and then forget it,
But does he do it? Never. He won’t quit
Being a fellow who’s forever noisome:
Smelly, you know, not to mention annoysome.
I don’t know how Judy, his long-suffering wife,
Has managed somehow to get on with her life
As well as she has, what with Gary’s gout,
His penchant for “projects” that seldom work out:
The studio gear, the outdoor umbrella
With table that he said could make a poor fella
Richer than Midas, or even than Croesus,
But did it? Ask Judy and she’ll holler “Jesus!
He’s driving me bonkers, he’s driving me wacky
With all these ideas that sound so damn tacky
That I could just scream.” She pauses, then does so,
Using her lung-power with a good deal of gusto.
Now he’s retired, so he’s asked for a hand up
From Judy the Sturdy so he can do stand-up
Saturday evenings, serve on the school board
And listen to speeches so he can be bored,
Call on his relatives to come break an arm
While erecting his opulent barn
And so on and so on. Well I could continue,
But as we can see, here’s a retinue
Who’d like to get up and give Gary a roasting.
I’ll build a pyre outdoors for his toasting.
Finally, here is a poem written in a nonce (invented for the occasion) form:
RICHARD WILBUR ON HIS 80TH BIRTHDAY
Oh, if your name were only “Wilver,”
With a v instead of b,
There would be a lot less silver
On this head of mine. You’d see
Brown again — some gray, at least.
For sure, perhaps, I’d be well fleeced
The way I was when we were younger...,
But you seem not to have grown old.
What’s going on, you ballad-monger?
Who is this fellow I behold
Now and again and here and there,
This tall, good-looking guy with hair?
If my old cat saw Richard Wilbur
I know exactly what she’d do
If she were young, too, and could still purr:
She’d climb up in your lap and mew,
And then she’d settle down and choose
To await the arrival of your Muse
(Although she’d probably spell is Mews).
Suggested writing exercise:
Write a birthday poem for someone.
Remembering Miller Williams
Miller Williams
It is only the second day of January, and 2015 is already one of the worst years I have ever experienced, for one of my political idols of yesteryear, former Governor of New York Mario Cuomo, strolled off this mortal coil yesterday, and today my dear old friend, editor, publisher, and Bread Loaf partner Miller Williams has died as well.
Miller Williams, born in Hoxie, Arkansas, in 1930, came out of a peculiar educational background for an academic poet, for he took a B. S. in biology from Arkansas State College, Conway, in 1951 and an M. S. in zoology from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, in 1952:
R.I.P. MILLER WILLIAMS
April 8, 1930-January 2, 2015
As odd or strange as it may seem to be,
Biology turned into poesy,
But he enjoyed his verses more than plums —
Now here lies our friend Miller Williams.
In 1961 both Miller and I applied for and were awarded poetry fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College (other poetry fellows of one kind or another that year were A. R. Ammons, Robert Huff, and Richard Frost). Subsequently the director, the late John Ciardi, saw to it that Miller was awarded the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. Williams began his career teaching biology at McNeese State College, but he asked me to provide him with a letter of reference when he applied for his first teaching position in English. I couldn't believe he'd want it as I was only in my early years of teaching myself, but he insisted that as the founding director of the Cleveland Poetry Center I had some pull, so i acceded to his request, and he never forgot it. He went to Loyola University in 1966, and after some wandering about returned to Fayetteville in 1971 where he taught in the Fayetteville English department and writing program until eventually he became a University Professor of English and, at last, director of the University of Arkansas Press, a position he used to build the Press into one of the foremost publishers of poetry and poetry criticism among the smaller university presses. In 1983 Bill Clinton, former governor of Arkansas, invited Miller to read the inaugural poem for Clinton’s second term as President of the United States of America.
Williams has also contributed to the literature of his time two important anthologies which have been widely used as textbooks, Contemporary Poetry in America (1973) and Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms (1986). He was worried that I would object to his book which would compete with my own Book of Forms, published 18 years earlier, but I encouraged him instead and collaborated with him on it through contributing poems by "Wesli Court" and proofreading the ms.
One of the earlier books Arkansas published was my first collection of critical essays, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry. Without telling me, Miller entered it for an award by the Poetry Society of America. I was notified by the Society that it had won the 1986 Melville Cane Award for 1iterary criticism. When I called Miller to ask if he’d done what he had, indeed, done, Miller was as amazed and delighted as I was, for it was I who broke the news to him. Three years later, in 1989, Arkansas published my The Shifting Web: New and Selected Poems.
In 1963 Williams had participated in a writers' conference held at the Cleveland Poetry Center of Fenn College (now Cleveland State University) which I had founded founded just the year before. There he made a number of cogent comments, but in the course of a panel discussion on "The Poet's Masks" he said one thing in particular that is relevant to a discussion of his work: "The poet lies to tell the truth." As an illustration of this thesis the poet used an incident that involved his son. One day the boy ran into the house and said, "A lion's chasing me!" Of course, there was no lion in the yard, but out of courtesy to childhood Williams looked, and there was a lion in the yard...in the form of a fair sized dog. The point Williams made was that to an adult the animal was a dog, but the quality of the boy's experience was that he had been threatened by something as large and menacing to him as a lion would be to an adult, so the child had "lied" in order to convey the magnitude of the experience to an older person. Williams' poems in his first book A Circle of Stone (1964) were, in these terms, a pack of lies. Each of them was an exaggeration, an attempt to get a mode of seeing and thinking down on paper in such a way as to help the reader to achieve the poet's original experience, or at least its essence.
Williams was equipped to find the right words with which to lie well, for he knew how to compose his work, not merely invent images or murk about for the sake of darkening although he was, perhaps, a "Southern Gothic" poet in the sense that he had a real feeling for the strange in mankind. He put words down in an order that gets them into the reader's mind and makes them stay there.
Williams' second book published in the United States (Recital, in a bilingual edition, appeared in Chile, also in 1964) was So Long at the Fair (1968). The Only World There Is followed (1971), and then Halfway from Hoxie in 1973. Why God Permits Evil appeared four years later, in 1977, and another four years passed before Distractions was published in 1981. The Boys on their Bony Mules was published in 1983, and Imperfect Love in 1986. Reading through his Living on the Surface: New and Selected Poems (1990) is not merely a pleasurable tour through the best work of these volumes, it is a fascinating introduction to a strong personality, an interesting revelation of the development of a fine and individual literary style, and an educational experience.
One of the features of Williams' style is the tone of the Baptist preacher, a down home diction combined with a pulpit rhetoric harnessed to serve an elevated purpose as in the elegy which is also a prayer, "For Clement Long, Dead," subtitled "lines written in the dark":
Lord listen, or heaven is undone.
He will not spell your name or take your hand,
will hee haw at the gate with a held breath,
will run away to the end where death is real.
Lord if you chase him like a wheatfield fire
till hallelujahs and a choir of angels
sing him coming and the grand gates open,
still he will stand against your house
where no sin ever is and no flesh fails.
If even he has treasures, let the mouse
discover the grain, take the worm to the tree.
Give his potential pleasures to the poor,
or watch him. And watch him well. And watching see
how he subverts the angels, whispering this:
ninety and nine returned and deserve attending;
surely the faithful one, the unoffending
son should have the calf; God, it's a small grace
to be a counter of coins in the first place.
The images are organic to the poem; although they would be unusual in the mouth of a real preacher, in the lines of Williams they are unobtrusive. The contexts of his poems allow the overtones one associates with the pulpit, but literary associations are not blocked out either, and the poems can be read on two levels -- the literal and the allegorical. Williams walks this fine line between rhetoric and symbolism as well as anyone has done during the past quarter century.
If we examine the first poem in Living on the Surface, "The Associate Professor Delivers an Exhortation to His Failing Students," we can isolate many of these elements and subsequently follow their development in the body of Williams' work. This piece combines something of the poet's characteristic oratorical quality with what is the major concern of the book, survival. At a glance, the poem appears to be "free verse" that is, line phrased prose: each line a phrase or a clause of some kind. The typographical level also tells us that the poem is strophic rather than stanzaic; there are twenty nine irregular sections, some as small as a line in length. Here are the first two strophes clearly, the professor is a biologist:
Now when the frogs
that gave their lives for nothing
are washed from the brains and pans
we laid them in
I leave to you
who most excusably misunderstand
the margins of my talks
which because I am wise
and am a coward
were not appended to the syllabus
but I will fail to tell you
what I tell you
even before you fail to understand
so we might in a manner of speaking
go down together.
An examination of the poem on the sonic level, however, quickly discovers that this is no kind of prose but variable accentual syllabic prosody. The meter is variable iambics, each line ranging in length from monometer to hexameter:
I should have told you something of importance
to give at least a meaning
to the letter:
how, after hope, it sometimes happens
a girl, anonymous as beer,
telling forgotten things in a cheap bar
how she could have taught here as well as I.
Better.
The first line of strophe three is iambic pentameter verse (see the scansion above), though it has some variations: a promotion of the central unstressed syllable, in a series of three, in the fourth foot and the substitution of an amphibrach in the fifth foot. The next line seems to consist of two iambs and an amphibrach, in that order, and the third line of strophe three would then look like two trochees. However, if one were to put lines two and three together, it would look like this:
to give at least a meaning to the letter.
In other words, lines two and three of strophe three, taken together, are metrically a duplicate of line one. What we have here, really, is two lines of iambic pentameter verse with falling endings or, to be descriptively more accurate, iambic hendecasyllabic(eleven syllable) verse.
Taking a hint from this discovery, we may look back at the beginning of the poem and see that "lines" 1 2 are also equal to one line of iambic pentameter verse, as are "lines" 3 4. The next two combined "lines," however, equal one hexameter, so not everything is going to boil down to pentameter, but it becomes fairly clear that the line phrasing of the poem is not a strong component of the prosody; rather, it is a disguise of the fact that Williams is writing verse. Perhaps this practice was itself a poetic survival mechanism during "The Great Hiatus" of twenty years and more in American formalist poetry during the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s when versewriting was proscribed and only "free verse composition" was allowed.
Taken at face, however, we may call Williams' prosody in this poem line phrased, variable accentual syllabics, and the meter is variable iambics, the range for the lines being from monometer to hexameter. There are great numbers of other sorts of variations in the meters; we can see some of them if we look at strophe 7. Williams substitutes other sorts of verse feet, including anapests,
The day I talked about the conduction of currents
I meant to say;
an occasional double iamb:
be careful about gettinghung up in the brain's things.
(This line may very well be the thesis of the poem, but more about that a bit later.)
In the beginning of the poem Williams did not do much with outright rhyme, but there are some line ending repetitions linking strophes one and two: you/you/you and misunderstand / under stand; consonances between strophes two, three, and six: together/letter/Better, and within strophe (couplet) five: beer/bar. True rhyme shows up in strophe seven: town/clown. This rhyme continues in strophe eight:
The day I lectured on adrenalin
I meant to tell you
as you were coming down
slowly out of the hills of certainty
empty your mind of the hopes that held you there.
Make a catechism of all your fears
and say it over:
this is the most of you...who knows...the best
where God was born
and heaven and confession
and half of love
from the fear of falling
and being flushed away
to the gulp of the suckhole and that rusting gut
from which no Jonah comes
that there is no Jesus and no hell
This passage is the thesis of the poem stated overtly. The lecturer is delivering a sermon on the subject of religion or the lack thereof in the existential modern world -- the associate professor, like Williams, is a biologist and, also like Williams, one of the lapsed and disillusioned faithful. The "failure" here is the failure of both students and teacher, each in the same and different ways. The ideational level of the poem is as important as the sonic.
Returning to a consideration of the latter, we note that from this point in the poem rhyme becomes an important consideration, and it grows as close as couplet rhyme, though more often it is still random (as usual, the emphases are added):
that God
square root of something equal to all
will not feel the imbalance when you fall
that rotting you will lie unbelievably alone
to be sucked up by some insignificant oak
as a child draws milk through straws
to be his bone.
These are the gravity that holds us together
toward our common sun
every hope getting out of hand
slings us hopelessly outward one by one
till all that kept us common is undone.
Rhyme (sun/one/undone) links strophes fifteen and sixteen; the latter ends, in fact, in a heroic couplet. As the poem progresses it is pulling together, becoming more and more formal, although Williams has maintained his disguises.
The sensory level of the poem is not complex. The basic tropes are descriptions rather than similes and metaphors. There are more rhetorical tropes than images allusion in particular:
The day you took the test
I would have told you this:
that you had no time to listen for questions
hunting out the answers in your files
is surely the kind of irony
poems are made of
that all the answers at best are less than half
and you would have remembered
Lazarus
who hung around with God or the devil for days
and nobody asked him
anything
The primary schemas are constructional, grammatic parallels mostly, but Williams also avoids punctuation throughout the poem: there are few marks of terminal punctuation, not many internally, either. Williams generally indicates a new sentence or paragraph, as he does in the next strophe, twenty one, simply with an initial capital letter:
if one Sunday morning they should ask you
the only thing that matters after all
tell them the only thing you know is true
tell them failing is an act of love
because
like sin
it is the commonality within
Now rhyming has progressed to such an extent that the next strophe, number twenty three, becomes a heroic quatrain consisting of two couplets; Williams says to tell them that is, the students,
how failing together we shall finally pass
how to pomp and circumstance all of a class
noble of eye, blind mares between our knees,
lances ready, we ride to Hercules.
With the puns on "pass" and "class" Williams works his way into the subdued metaphor that has lain dormant throughout the poem till now. This strophe also contains the only overt metaphor of the poem we are all knights, Don Quixotes de la Mancha, riding out to do battle with Death; we will simultaneously fail and pass on.
Another heroic couplet begins the penultimate strophe twenty four which then returns to a semblance of prose:
The day I said this had I meant to hope
some impossible punk on a cold slope
stupidly alone
would build himself a fire
to make of me an idiot
and a liar
But the last two lines are now obviously yet another disguised heroic couplet; indeed, if the word himself were not present, the last two "strophes" would be another heroic quatrain and might be written out like this:
The day I said this had I meant to hope
some impossible punk on a cold slope
stupidly alone would build...a fire
to make of me an idiot and a liar
The poem ends without punctuation, but Williams has asked a question, not made a statement. The mood of the poem is of disillusion; there is a touch of bitterness in it gall brought on by a loss of faith, and perhaps of despair staved off at a great cost of will. The viewpoint is dramatic, for, though Williams clearly draws on his own background, he has created a persona who speaks a monologue to an assumed audience of his students. The level of diction is intelligent but not overly intellectual, and the style is mean, not high. If the subject itself is the human intellect, then Williams' thesis is that, though the mind may be an untrustworthy guide through life, intellect is the only guide that mankind has.
The major genre of the poem, then, is dramatics; the specific form is the monologue, though if this were written subjectively it would be a sermon with a strong didactic element. The levels emphasized are the sonic and the ideational, though the typographical is important to Williams' disguise of his prosody, and toward the end of the poem there is heavier emphasis on the sensory.
The poem balances the conflict of intellect with mystery extremely well, especially, it seems to me, for an early poem. All, or nearly all of the elements of Williams' mature style arehere, and the poem is a good one for that reason as well as for intrinsic considerations.
"Voice of America," from The Only World There Is, finally gives up all technical disguises and announces itself typographically as a verse mode poem written in quatrain stanzas. Sonically, it is written in normative accentual syllabics the running foot is iambic and the line length is tetrameter, but as in the earlier poem there are many variations. The rhyme scheme is abcb; thus, the specific form is long measure, from the family of common measure stanzas. It is a cautionary speech in the form of a lyric utilizing the devices we have already noted including repetition and parallelism ("Do not imagine..." begins many stanzas and lines), alliteration, consonance, echo, and assonance.
The sensory level contains, again, primarily descriptions, but there is irony too, and the main image is a simile, "like a bullet hitting a head" the sperm "crashes in" upon the egg to begin the process of reproduction. It appears to be a garish image until, reading closely, we understand that the real comparison is with a rifle bullet entering the head of its victim to finish a life in the same way that life began. The mood of the poem is tense and ominous.
Eventually it will occur to the reader that the subject ofthe poem is not reproduction but assassination. The schemas Williams uses here are repetitional primarily, the repetitions conjuring up an obsession. The viewpoint is narrative and the syntax is objective a cautionary tale is being told with illustrations. The level of diction is that of a parent or a teacher (or even a preacher) warning an older child by means of illustrations. The poem, then, is a didactic lyric with a strong narrative element. The levels are in balance there is even a typographical hiatus in the penultimate line of the eleventh and last stanza to suggest the hole the bullet is making in the head of its victim. This is a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King, or Robert Kennedy...or anyone in this world who meets a violent end.
Williams' most ambitious and longest poem, "Notes from the Agent on Earth: How to be Human," appeared in Why God PermitsEvil. It appears at first glance to be a verse mode poem built in both long sections and short cantos and strophes; none of the cantos are titled. Scansion shows that, indeed, it is verse, normative accentual syllabic prosody, in fact: the meters are iambic pentameter, but it is not quite blank verse as in many of his other poems, there is random end rhyme which at times becomes couplet rhyme, and there are other sorts of sonic devices often taking the place of rhyme, such as consonance and repetition. Williams' jazzy variations haven't changed, either. The general form of the poem is that of the elegy, and the Southern preacher inhabits the voice of this poem, as it does in other Williams works, so that at times it partakes of the sermon.
There are seven cantos here and, though there are no titles, each of the middle five begin with a parallel: "This is about..."; the first canto is an introduction the scene is Rome, St. Peter's Basilica. The speaker is looking at statuary: St. Gregory sits on a slab under which "the devil, winged and dog faced, cat pawed and crooked / turns in his agony and bares his teeth, / bares his broken claws, turns his nostrils / almost inside out."
The last canto is the summation, a coda. It begins, "There is much that matters. What matters most is survival." Williams' lifelong theme is thus stated in so many words. In between the prologue and the epilogue the cantos announce themselves: "This is about Love and how to tell it." "This is about Faith and how to tell it." "This is about the Will to Power, Envy, Covetousness, Ambition...." "This is about Death and how to tell it." "This is also something about Ambition. Also Love. And Faith also. And Death."
The sensory level contains, like the earlier poems, primarily descriptions that sometimes ascend to metaphor, but far outnumbering these are the rhetorical tropes; in particular, Williams here displays a real talent for coining aphorisms: "Love is Fear and Loneliness fed and sleeping; / Faith is Fear and Loneliness explained, / denied and dealt in; Ambition which is envy / is Fear and Loneliness coming up to get you; / Death is Fear and Loneliness fading out." The emotional thrust of the poem is thoughtful tranquility shot through with neurotic disillusion.
The ideation of the poem revolves around the subject of existence. As we can see, the schemas used are repetitional and constructional, in particular the long parallels of the cantos. The voice here is only partly narrative, for Williams steps out from behind all his masks in this poem to assume the subjective viewpoint and the egopoetic stance. The syntax follows the form of his thought and only now and again the form of an action. The level of diction is slightly elevated, but the style is mean, not at all florid, though there are some gothic scenes, especially in the prologue. One might be tempted to call the form of the poem georgics, for it is a handbook on how to get through life.
Fusionally, the poem is lyrical and didactic and the levels are balanced, though clearly the ideational is most heavily weighted. For all its preacherly qualities, the poem is most readable, for Williams is ever the musician of language.
In The Boys on Their Bony Mules Williams wrote with a greater sense of story. His rhythms and tropes were so well grounded in meter and in the particular that the reader hardly noticed the large issue, the thought rising from its base. Williams, despite his scientific background, is one of those poets who were trained, or who trained themselves, in the basics of verse composition and built from that foundation a style of writing and an angle of vision that enabled them to range widely and plunge deeply into the world and the self.
As always in his work, the poems in Imperfect Love formal lyrics and short narratives considered the human condition in its myriad formations and transformations in such a way as to provide the reader with both insight and delight, as in "A Little Poem":
for Jack Marr
We say that some are mad. In fact
if we have all the words and we
make madness mean the way they act
then they as all of us can see
are surely mad. And then again
if they have all the words and call
madness something else, well then
well then, they are not mad at all.
Also in 1986 Williams took a role to the forefront of the blossoming Neoformalist movement with the publication of his text/anthology, Patterns of poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms, of which the late John Ciardi said, "Miller Williams has performed a brilliant service in this book.... I recommend it to everyone who dares to think he can teach anyone to be a poet." Through this volume's pages the new generation of poets are beginning again to understand that when a poet writes formally the burden of tradition need not inhibit him in the treatment of the particular subject in hand. This is the true reason that many of the poets of the past two decades have shuddered at the thought of traditional forms: they feel smothered, and indeed they are, but when someone comes along, like Williams, who can understand and release the power of the old constructs in an individual and imaginative manner, the form helps the poet to say the necessary thing.
Miller Williams, then, has done contemporary poetry a singular service in that, during the indulgent decades, he maintained a level of artistry committed both to tradition and to a personal vision. This poetry of balance, of intelligence as well as feeling, will serve as a benchmark to the new generation of poets who are feeling their way back to a sense of writing as literature, not merely self expression. But his commitment to the craft of poetry took more forms than just the maintenance of high personal standards. Williams remains the teacher or, if you will, the preacher who exhorts his audience by precept and example. He used his pulpit to spread the word and the book until the day he retired.
AVATARS
For Miller Williams, on his retirement
It's time to start to think of growing old.
We've put it off as long as is feasible,
Perhaps. When one is young, the impossible
Is what one sings of: love and death, the bold
Clasp of the ideal mistress and the cold
Grasp of the grave: romantic cock-and-bull.
One seldom writes of the Unspeakable
Although its avatars are manifold.
So now it's time to think of what we see
Staring at us over the bathroom sink
Each morning. Here's the fellow we've defied
All our lifetime long. We perfectly
Discern the Shadowman beyond the wink
Of hours in the glass. We cannot hide.*
Of late years Miller had been suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, but I continued to stay in touch with him by email, and I sent him copies of my books as they came out. I was always relieved to hear back from him and to realize that he continued to recall who I was. Last year I wrote an epic, a new realization, really, of the Epic of Gilgamesh, called The Hero Enkidu. It will be published this year by Bordighera, but I couldn’t be sure Miller would be available till then, so I sent him a PDF file of the manuscript a few months ago. This is what he wrote back:
"Well, Lew, I've read your epic, and I can remember enjoying it very much. There's a problem, though--not with what you created but with me. I don't know if I've told you that I'm living now with Alzheimer's disease, which flushes one's memory away. I can recall enjoying the story but don't remember what the story was. I'm sorry, my friend, especially because you're one of my friends that I remember well. I know that you understand and will forgive me. Be happy and healthy and know that this comes with love.
"Miller"
* From The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by “Wesli Court,” a.k.a. Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842-43-2, trade paperback, 115 pp.
COMMENTS
Thank you Lew --
He went very quickly with little suffering. It's a sad time here, I appreciate your thoughts. There will be a memorial service sometime in the spring. I've been laid up with a broken leg (happened last Sunday when I fell on the basement stairs). It was a bad enough break to require surgery so I won't be doing much but recovering for a few months. I will still check his email and will let people know when and where the celebration is.
Thanks so much,
Jordan
Thank you so much for sending this to me. As a grad student at the U of A in 1971, I took a class in contemporary poetry with Miller Williams and really enjoyed it. With a preacher's passion, Miller introduced us to many of the poets I've read and revered over the years since, including Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Justice and Theodore Roethke. On the occasion of my first marriage, Big Jim Whitehead gifted me a hardbound copy of Miller's A Circle of Stone. I still have the battered paperback of his Southern Writers of the Sixties as well as 6 or 7 of his poetry collections, which I like to go back and reread some of my favorite poems of his. I was proud when Miller read at Bill Clinton’s inauguration.
Don K.
The Miller Williams essay is first-rate, thoughtful, informed (as always), and filled with perceptive analysis and feeling. Find a place where it can reach as wide an audience as possible.
David H.
RE. your Miller Williams epitaph and the piece following it--terrific. Meant to say so in previous message but hit "send" by accident. Thanks for sharing this.
Clarinda H.
This is a wonderful tribute and a shared, warm appreciation of poetics and the love of poetry. And done so quickly. I admire this tremendously.
Chris W.
Yes. I read it at the blog yesterday, and words failed me. I am so sorry. You did a fine and fitting tribute. But it is a hard losd.
Ruth F. H.
Yet another poet dies of that dreadful disease. Remember three years ago my friend Jack Gilbert, with whom I taught two summers in Kentucky, died of the same. Another of my friends, the great jazz guitarist Herb Ellis also died of the disease. Sorry for your loss of the friendship, but we all still have his fine lines.
I read most of your analysis of his work, and that beautiful letter that ends the piece. Good thinking, Lew. At least that part of your world has not been taken from you by age.
John H.
January 02, 2015 in Announcements, Books, Commentary, Criticism, Current Affairs, Epitaphs, Literature, Memoirs, Poems, Poetry | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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