POET

Miller Williams (1930 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Little in Miller Williams's early training prepared him for the life of a poet: he earned advanced degrees in biology, then left teaching for jobs that ranged from retail to factory work. Encouragement from poets John Ciardi and Howard Nemerov steered Williams toward a teaching position at Louisiana State University in 1962, and his career has grown steadily from there. Leon Stokesbury, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, stated that "among those poets of the American South whose careers began in the 1960s and who achieved national recognition in the 1970s and 1980s, Miller Williams is the most gifted and has compiled the most significant body of work." Beginning with his 1964 collection Circle of Stone, Williams has been, according to Martin McGovern in Contemporary Poets, "a poet of the American small town, its streets and neighborhoods, its bus stations and shabby factories." Stylistically, Williams's poems range from ornate yet clever formal poems to prosaic and colloquial free verse, including dramatic monologues. He centers his poems in the material world, wrestling with what Stokesbury referred to as Miller's "central paradox," that "humankind is compelled to seek what is true and meaningful about existence and the universe, yet has only observation and reason as aids."

Halfway from Hoxie: New and Selected Poems brought Williams favorable critical response, especially with his taking a new direction with more serious and surreal poems like "And Then" which ends with "someone wearing a coat you would not have worn / will ask was that your husband / she will say yes." Why God Permits Evil represented "a leap forward for Williams," declared Stokesbury. It includes "Notes from the Agent on Earth: How to Be Human," what Stokesbury called "a sort of epistolary monologue consisting of messages" from an advanced scout from another planet who discovers ultimately that the message is "a bleak one," that the major human attributes are fear and isolation. The title poem, "Why God Permits Evil: For Answer to This Question of Interest to Many Write Bible Answers Dept. E-7," based upon a matchbook cover ad, has been called "the crowning achievement of the book" by Stokesbury, as the reader is led down a hall past E-7, E-6 and other rooms, finding the answer finally in a room where "there sits a pale, tall and long-haired woman / upon a cushion of fleece and eiderdown / holding in one hand a hand-written answer, / holding in the other hand a brown / plain envelope. On either side, cobwebbed / and empty baskets sitting on the floor / saying in and out. There is not sound in the room. / There is no knob on the door. Or there is no door."

Distractions, Williams's shortest book, offered readers translations, poems about Rome, and a poem for his granddaughter, "Rebecca, for Whom Nothing Has Been Written Page after Page," in which he discovers the limits of language, noting "What phrase explains, what simile can guess / a daughter's daughter?" The Boys on Their Bony Mules continued Williams's common theme of how humans are "left with little hope but survival by holding onto one another," commented Stokesbury. In "Living on the Surface," Williams compares humans to the dolphins who, after leaving the water for the land, returned, observing how "We do it anyway / lugging a small part of the sea around. / It leaks out our eyes. / We swim inside ourselves / but we walk on the land."

Imperfect Love is noted for its use of dramatic monologues, including those from such diverse characters as a senator, a businessman, and a death row prisoner. In one poem, an aging waitress tells the reader how she "never had a thought about time. / Now, turning through newspapers, I pause / to see if anyone who passed away / was younger than I am." In Living on the Surface, a selection of poems from his previous eight volumes, plus fifteen new poems, Williams continued his work with dramatic monologues, including "Ritual" in which the speaker is a moonshiner returning from his brother's funeral.

When Williams brought out Adjusting to the Light, a Publishers Weekly reviewer praised Williams for continuing to write "rhymed, strictly metered poems long before 'new formalism' became fashionable." Williams followed with Points of Departure and The Ways We Touch, the latter of which included "Of History and Hope."

Though he enjoyed a solid literary reputation among poets and critics, Williams only came to national attention in 1997 when he was selected by President Bill Clinton to read his poem "Of History and Hope" at the second Clinton inauguration, an honor that he shares with only two other poets, Robert Frost for the John F. Kennedy inauguration in 1961, and Maya Angelou at Clinton's first inaugural in 1993. Additionally, Clinton presented Williams with the National Arts Award in recognition of his life-long contribution to the arts. According to a Choice reviewer, throughout his career as a poet, Williams has been able "to continually rediscover what is vital and musical in the language Americans speak."

Williams's 1999 collection, Some Jazz a While, establishes him as a poet "of eloquent sanity and distinguished formal competence," according to Lee Oser writing in World Literature Today. Oser found many of the poems in this collection noteworthy. "71 South" is a poem that "sees its subject in a way that John Ciardi . . . would have admired," Oser observed. And with the poems "The Office Party," "The Affair," and "The Sissy," "Williams shows himself to be a fine observer of the emotional and imaginative lives of his fellow citizens," according to the same critic.

CAREER

McNeece State College, Lake Charles, LA, and Millsaps College, Jackson, MS, biology instructor, intermittently, 1952-60; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, instructor, 1962-63, assistant professor of English, 1964-66; Loyola University, New Orleans, LA, associate professor of English, 1966-70; University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, associate professor, 1971-73, professor of English, 1973—, chair of comparative literature program, 1978-80, co-director of graduate program in creative writing, 1970-84. Visiting professor, University of Chile, 1964; Fulbright professor of American studies, National University of Mexico, 1970. Director, University of Arkansas Press, 1980-97.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

A Circle of Stone, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1964, bilingual edition published as Recital, Ediciones Oceano (Valparaiso, Chile), 1965.
So Long at the Fair, Dutton (New York, NY), 1968.
The Only World There Is, Dutton (New York, NY), 1971.
Halfway from Hoxie: New and Selected Poems, Dutton (New York, NY), 1973.
Why God Permits Evil: New Poems, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1977.
Distractions, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1981.
The Boys on Their Bony Mules, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1983.
Imperfect Love, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1986.
Living on the Surface: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1989.
Adjusting to the Light, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1992.
Points of Departure, University of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 1995.
The Ways We Touch, University of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 1997.
Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1999.

OTHER

(Editor) 19 Poetas de Hoy en los EEUU, U.S. Information Service (Valparaiso, Chile), 1964.
(Editor, with John William Corrington) Southern Writings in the Sixties: Fiction, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1966.
(Editor, with Corrington) Southern Writing in the Sixties: Poetry, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1967.
(Translator) Nicanor Parra, Poems and Antipoems, New Directions (New York, NY), 1967.
(Editor) Chile: An Anthology of New Writing, Kent State University Press (Kent, OH), 1968.
(Editor) The Achievement of John Ciardi: A Comprehensive Selection of His Poems with a Critical Introduction, Scott, Foresman (Glenview, IL), 1969.
The Poetry of John Crowe Ransom, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1972.
(Translator) Nicanor Parra, Emergency Poems, New Directions (New York, NY), 1972.
(Editor) Contemporary Poetry in America, Random House (New York, NY), 1973.
The Poetry of Miller Williams (sound recording), Norton (New York, NY), 1974.
(Editor, with John Ciardi) How Does a Poem Mean?, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1975.
(Assistant editor, with James Whitehead) All of Us and None of You and Other Original Fiction and Poetry with a Symposium on Book Reviews in America, edited with an introduction by George Garrett, Anchor Press (Garden City, NY), 1975.
(Editor, with James A. McPherson) Railroad: Trains and Train People in American Culture, Random House (New York, NY), 1976.
(Editor) A Roman Collection: Stories, Poems, and Other Good Pieces by the Writing Residents of the American Academy in Rome, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1980.
(Editor) Ozark, Ozark: A Hillside Reader, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1981.
(Translator), Giuseppe Belli, Sonnets of Giuseppe Belli, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1981.
Poems of Miller Williams (sound recording), Spoken Arts (New Rochelle, NY), 1982.
Patterns of Poetry: A Encyclopedia of Forms, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1986.
(Selector and arranger) John Ciardi, Stations of the Air: Thirty-Three Poems, BkMk Press (Kansas City, MO), 1993.
The Lives of Kelvin Fletcher (short stories), University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals, including American Scholar, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Saturday Review, and Shenandoah. Advisory editor in poetry, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge. Poetry editor, Lousiana State University Press, 1966-68; editor, New Orleans Review, 1968-69; contributing editor, Translation Review.