Oxford American talks with Arkansas poet Miller Williams

Miller Williams

The Oxford American magazine has always had a unique twist on its Southern vision, equally at home with arcane politicians and bourbon makers, poets, charlatans and preachers, and the miseries of the disenfranchised. Its online content is always a surprise, too, with worthwhile features not found in the OA's print quarterly.

A recent online interview with Arkansas poet Miller Williams discusses his meeting with Hank Williams before delving into his career as a translator, while making the broader point that for Williams "the music of poetry" is more than a phrase. "I think the kinship is real," he tells Jackson Meazle.   Here's an excerpt from "A Tenth Anniversary Photograph, 1952" (1999):

... People walked alone in parks.
Children slept in their yards at night. 
Most every man had a paying job,
and black was black and white was white.

Would you go back? Say that you can, 
that all it takes is a wave and a wink 
and there you are. So what do you do? 
The question is crueler than you think.

Though he entered college as double major in English and foreign languages, an aptitude test revealed “absolutely no aptitude in the handling of words,” Williams has said in interviews. He changed his major to hard sciences to avoid “embarrassing my parents.”  He taught science at the college-level for many years before securing a job in the English department at Louisiana State University, partly with the help of his friend Flannery O’Connor.

“We became dear friends and in 1961, LSU advertised for a poet to teach in their writing program. Though I had only had three hours of freshman English formally, she saw the ad and, without mentioning it to me, wrote them and said the person you want teaches biology at Wesleyan College. They couldn’t believe that, of course, but they couldn’t ignore Flannery O’Connor. So they sent me word that said, ‘Would you send us some of your work?’ And I did.”

Here's a brief excerpt from the online interview.

OA: You have written somewhat extensively in argument for rhyme and meter in poetry. How has music informed your work? Arkansas, like many Southern states, has such a rich musical heritage. Has music always been of interest to you and your work? 

MW: I do believe that poetry is more satisfying when it has a pattern similar to those of songs. I wish that I could sing well, as I'm sure you know my daughter Lucinda does, and writes her own songs. Hank Williams (no kinship there) told me that since he often wrote his lyrics months before he set them to music, they spent those months as sort-of poems. I think the kinship is real. 

OA: Did you ever meet Hank Williams in person? 

MW: Yes, [in 1952] I was on the faculty of McNeese State College in Lake Charles, Louisiana, when he had a concert there. I stepped onstage when he and his band were putting their instruments away and when he glanced at me I said, "Mr. Williams, my name is Williams and I'd be honored to buy you a beer." To my surprise, he asked me where we could get one. I said there was a gas station about a block away where we could sit and drink a couple. (You may not be aware that gas stations used to have bars.) He asked me to tell his bus driver exactly where it was and then he joined me. When he ordered his beer, I ordered a glass of wine, because this was my first year on a college faculty and it seemed the appropriate thing to do. We sat and chatted for a little over an hour. When he ordered another beer he asked me about my family. I told him that I was married and that we were looking forward to the birth of our first child in about a month. He asked me what I did with my days and I told him that I taught biology at McNeese and that when I was home I wrote poems. He smiled and told me that he had written lots of poems. When I said, “Hey—you write songs!” he said, “Yeah, but it usually takes me a long time. I might write the words in January and the music six or eight months later; until I do, what I've got is a poem.” Then his driver showed up, and as he stood up to leave he leaned over, put his palm on my shoulder, and said, “You ought to drink beer, Williams, ’cause you got a beer-drinkin’ soul.” He died the first day of the following year. When Lucinda was born I wanted to tell her about our meeting, but I waited until she was onstage herself. Not very long ago, she was asked to set to music words that he had left to themselves when he died. This almost redefines coincidence. ... 

OA: What has it been like to be a poet in Arkansas? It sometimes seems a bit lonely because poetry is not valued as much as other art forms. Did you ever have a notion that it was impractical to write poems, or does the poem’s strength lie in its impracticality, its mystery? 

MW: I've enjoyed all the years I've lived in Arkansas, and was pleased—once I started writing—at how well my poems are received here. A reviewer said, a few years ago, that "Miller Williams is the Hank Williams of American poetry because, though his poems are discussed in classrooms at Princeton and Harvard, they're read, understood, and appreciated by squirrel hunters and taxi drivers." 

OA: One tool the poet likes to keep in her belt is an ear for spoken language. Do you believe that Southern idioms and turns of phrase are an advantage to Southern poets? 

MW: I do, so long as every phrase in the poem is understandable to everyone who speaks English. ...

Williams has edited  a dozen poetry collections, such as Halfway from Hoxie: New and Selected Poems (1973); Living on the Surface: New and Selected Poems (1989), which received the Poets’ Prize; Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems (1999); and Time and the Tilting Earth (2008). He is also the author of Making a Poem: Some Thoughts about Poetry and the People Who Write It (2006).

David Maisel, "The Library of Dust:": The art of the forgotten

From poet C.A. Conrad comes this link to David Maisel's Library of Dust. Here's an article at boingboing about this extraordinary exhibit, which was mounted at San Francisco's Haines Gallery in 2008. A book featuring Maisel's photographs of copper cremation cannisters found at the abandoned Oregon State Hospital (filming site of Milos Foreman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) is published by Chronicle Books; the Oregon State Hospital is currently slated for demolition. Conrad remarks, with the sweet irony that only all we the living can afford, "these people were so neglected, so hated for their conditions while living, but now people (can) flock from all over to see the urns of their remains."

From David Maisel's website: "Library of Dust depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patients from a state-run psychiatric hospital. The patients died at the hospital between 1883 (the year the facility opened, when it was called the Oregon State Insane Asylum) and the 1970’s; their bodies have remained unclaimed by their families. The approximately 3,500 copper canisters have a handmade quality; they are at turns burnished or dull; corrosion blooms wildly from the leaden seams and across the surfaces of many of the cans.

Numbers are stamped into each lid; the lowest number is 01, and the highest is 5,118. The vestiges of paper labels with the names of the dead, the etching of the copper, and the intensely hued colors of the blooming minerals combine to individuate the canisters. These deformations sometimes evoke the celestial - the northern lights, the moons of some alien planet, or constellations in the night sky. Sublimely beautiful, yet disquieting, the enigmatic photographs in Library of Dust are meditations on issues of matter and spirit.

The room housing these canisters is an attempt for order, categorization, and rationality to be imposed upon randomness, chaos, and the irrational. The canisters, however, insistently and continually change their form over time; they are chemical and alchemical sites of transformation, both organic and mineralogical, living and dead. The Library of Dust describes this labyrinth, and in doing so, gives form to the forgotten."

Maisel, quoted here from the article at boingboing: “There are certainly physical and chemical explanations for the ways these canisters have transformed over time ... but perhaps the canisters also encourage us to consider what happens to our own bodies when we die, and what may happen to the souls that occupied our bodies. Matter, these canisters show, lives on when the body vanishes, even when it has been incinerated to ash by an institutional practice."

"Everything's Better in Poland:" Three books of poetry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Linda Nemec Foster

 

 

 

In America it's easier to anticipate what's coming next rather than to appreciate what came before. The rapidity of our collective memory loss means that history becomes a timeline not only of ideas but of images (the American Revolution, say, is a painting of three beat-up soldiers we imagine playing "Yankee Doodle": a piper, a drummer, and a flag.)

As fast as we learn to forget, the past takes a long time to remember. As simple as we like to pretend "the good old days" really weren't, imagine in fifty years (all right, make that one hundred) how obvious the present will seem in all its current calamity and distress.

Many families came from other countries to the United States in their own times of need and opportunity. My own great-times-2, Stanislaw, decided in 1905 that the Russians next door were making too much noise -- a minor revolution was in progress, threatening to once again prove the truth of the old Polish proverb "Trouble comes from the east": Zmartwienie przyjechał z wschód.

He himself went west across the Atlantic to the U.S., to Pittsburgh, and brought the rest of his family over, one by one, in the next twelve years. Twelve years! Imagine that kind of patience these days. My father was born in Pittsburgh in 1919 and went to a primary school where Polish was the first language.

Leonard Kress's essay in Artful Dodge 46/47 "Wszystko lepiej w Polsce (Everything's Better in Poland)" reviews three books of poetry that echo the immigrant experience as it deepened into American cities -- Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New York -- and became the new story for generations born in the 20th century. Even as the Polish language progressively became a memory of the old country, it functioned almost as a lullaby that resonated with time:

As I drifted of to sleep at night, I often heard

my parents talk about the neighbors in hushed whispers.

Kosmarek the Drunk,

Polumski the Wise Guy and the Barking Dog.

Horvath the Creep.

This litany in English would ultimately drift

into one in Polish: dzika, swinia, brudna swinia,

dziki Amerykanin. Wild Pig, dirty pig, Wild American.

("The Old Neighborhood", Linda Nemec Foster,

in Amber Necklace from Gdansk)

As Kress notes, many poems are filled with "the three P's" -- polkas, parades, and pierogies --hallmarks of the Polish pride that first generations felt in their new homeland and shared with their children. Yet there's more than just sweet memory of nostalgia here in Kress' review of these poems. There is also the sharp edge of politics, the sardonic view of the politically displaced for whom life had to be better here than back home, even as the scrub pines of New Jersey were stand-ins for those on the banks of the Vistula: Ach, sosnowe powietze, najlepsze na swiecie. ("Oh, the pine air / the best in the world.")

Karen Kovacik

This idea of a better life regardless of other hardships and deprivations was passed on as the immigrant generation raised their families, and as the household appliances multiplied in their kitchens. By the 1960s the Cold War brought the sons and daughters political realities unimagined by their parents. For a while it seemed possible that electric blenders and built-in dishwashers could conquer the Soviet empire, although Nikita Khruschev has the final word here when East meets West:

But how can he persuade this slender American,

this shy stranger who probably has never laughed at a party,

except when a camera is pointed his way?

Nikita waves his arms but no sound comes out.

He imagines Nixon late at night, lonely under a circle

of kitchen light, with a wife and appliances

spinning in the background. He sees Nixon

hunched over a pink teacup, blowing on his fingers,

afraid of everything he can't admit he fears.

Lev Tolstoy had it right, he thinks: It is difficult

to tell the truth and the young are rarely capable of it.

("Nixon and Nikita in the Kitchen," Karen Kovacik,

in Beyond the Velvet Curtain)

Georgia Scott

And there is the poetry of Georgia Scott, who teaches at the University in Gdansk, in which the immigrant generation seems to have come full circle. The insistent longing for home that provided immigrants with their memories, here gets turned on its head: Scott, living in Poland, writes poems like telegrams back to the adopted country. Twenty years after the shipyard revolutions of Solidarity, with its sweeping political possibilities, the cultural reality seems an echo of the country that Scott left behind:

I am not in prison

I have no cause to lie awake

refurnishing rooms as I remember them

the positions of cushions and toothbrushes

smells of sink cleaner, sausages, flowers

the graffiti in the hall

"Dead Kennedys" and "1984"

schoolboys singing soccer and Solidarity songs

roller skates whirring behind the rag 'n bone man's cart

the bows on the little girls' heads like the blades of helicopters

a tank left in the park, children swinging from the gun

the cries of mothers to come home

("In America," Georgia Scott, in The Good Wife)

Memory has a powerful pull no matter what the culture holds; it's in the images that we imagine we remember, more so than the long-gone and often painful reality we choose to forget. In the meantime, I'm wondering the cost of a new subscription to my father's weekly and regular delivery of the Narod Polski newspaper.

"The Best Non-Required Reading" series: fun reading, even in airports

Literary anthologies are meant be be read as randomly as they seem to be presented -- that is, in no order, and certainly with no specific goal in mind other than to pass the time while doing laundry or sitting in the Minneapolis airport waiting for a flight. So it was a surprise to find the 2006 edition of The Best American Nonrequired Reading (edited by McSweeney's Dave Eggers) arranged with some themes. Section One consisted of a pop-culture "best-of": Headlines from The Onion, first sentences of novels published in 2005, new American band names, things to know about Chuck Norris. Sure, okay, goofy bits and lists are fun reading, but their freshness-dating is pretty limited. I know that Dave won't find it so funny in ten years when Senator Norris's House Un-American Activities hearings catch up to him.

The second section seems more thoughtful, and more selective. By 2006 the initial "shock and awe" of the Iraq war was unraveling into an unending American role; reports from Iraq make up much of the serious material included here. Readers who are interested can read the new Iraqi constitution, along with the unpublished piece "Are Iraqis Optimistic?" by the Lincoln Group, a Washington-based defense contractor whose goal was to give a positive spin on the U.S. occupation. There are short stories by Rick Moody and Haruki Murakami, and David Rakoff's "Love It or Leave It," detailing his efforts to become an American citizen. There's George Saunders' visit to Dubai, "The New Mecca," which originally appeared in GQ, of all places: that one might have gotten away, but I would have missed his entertaining writing on Dubai's Arabian Ice City.

Capturing "the best" of a literary year in print (even its "nonrequired" reading) must be a maddening task, especially now, when the internet seems to be an increasingly attractive source. Eggers is at least upfront about it -- "we also came across a variety of things that didn't fit neatly anywhere, but which we felt should be included," he writes -- fitting the definition of "nonrequired" reading, of course, but much of it "non-essential" as well.

By broadening the scope of the book, Eggers runs the risk of weakening it. That's one of the issues faced by any anthology editor: with so many choices, how do you equate the timely writing of, say, Tom Downey's The Insurgent's Tale and Michael Lewis's return to a slowly-recovering New Orleans, Wading Toward Home, with five scenes from Miranda July's shooting script of Me and You and Everyone We Know? The inclusion of The Best American Things to Know About Hoboes, John Hodgman's overwrought "history" from The Areas of My Expertise, is a pale shadow next to Kurt Vonnegut's Here Is a Lesson in Creative Writing:

Now, I don't mean to intimidate you, but after being a chemist as an undergraduate at Cornell, after the war I went to the University of Chicago and studied anthropology, and eventually I took a master's degree in that field. Saul Bellow was in the same department, and neither one of us ever made a field trip.

Although we certainly imagined some. I started going to the library in search of reports about ethnographers, preachers, and explorers -- those imperialists -- to find out what sorts of stories they'd collected from primitive people. It was a big mistake for me to take a degree in anthropology anyway, because I can't stand primitive people -- they're so stupid. ... Primitive people deserve to lose with their lousy stories.

With his characteristic deadpan humor (and accompanying graphs and charts) Vonnegut then goes on to explain how Shakespeare's Hamlet shares the best features of a primitive mythology: the greatest English dramatist, he concludes, is "as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho." It's his final lesson in the power of storytelling and its charms (from A Man Without a Country), and a real gem. The benefits of a collection like the 2006 book -- Eggers has been the "Nonrequired Reading" series editor since its inception in 2000 -- is that it gives a place to writing that otherwise might be overlooked in the jungle of weekly magazines, monthly glossies, newspapers and literary magazines. (Perhaps it's time for Eggers to edit that next, glorious irony: a yearly compilation, in print, of the best of the internet.) The introduction here is provided by Matt Groening, who certainly had no trouble discerning his own required reading at a very early age:

My obsessive love of reading began before I could read at all. As a wee tyke I remember being entranced by my older brother Mark's 1950s-era Little Lulu, Donald Duck, and Mad comic books."You know how much you like looking at those pictures?" Mark asked me."Well, when you can read the words in the balloons, it's a zillion times funnier."

The disappearing act of J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger has made his final lope into the New Hampshire woods near Cornish, and with his death the reclusive author leaves behind a literary industry of the ever-hopeful. Those who waited for decades will have to wait even longer for the Salinger estate to decide when, or if, any of the rumored fifteen unpublished novels will see print.

That decision will likely be a crapshoot. The most appropriate gesture from the author who shunned any contact with "a reading public" for over fifty years would have been an early morning January 1, 2010 birthday auto-da-fé in his leafy woods, flames licking the ink right off the burning pages.

No one else of his stature has made such a celebrated career of non-publishing, although most authors achieve that goal without even trying, and with much less celebrity. Over the years Salinger's active disinterest in publishing was by turns puzzling, exasperating, and -- at end -- inexplicable and unexplained, even as it took on the cast of an angry author hiding in the woods away from the rest of the world and quite incensed at its decades-long attempts to lure him and his manuscripts into the daylight.

Salinger's claim was that he was writing only for himself, and fair enough, but his literary disappearing act now reaches a logical climax. Many writers' unpublished manuscripts become even more of a fetish-object after an author's death and it's unrealistic to think interest in what Salinger left unpublished will diminish -- at last, though, he will rest peacefully where no one can come knocking.

In death Salinger (and his estate) still have control over those unseen pages, but the ensuing years of rumors and leaks, con and craft, or sheer contentiousness among surviving parties, could be more damaging than any unwanted attention experienced while he was alive.

Salinger fought to exhaustion efforts to publish a biography by Ian Hamilton in the 1980s, and the case traveled as far as the Supreme Court before Salinger won a decision. In his original letter of refusal to Hamilton, the author claimed to have “borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime.” Ironically, death may turn out to be a most unexpected court of appeal.

Although the passage of time itself may puncture Salinger's carefully-crafted privacy, personal memoirs can be just as damaging. The arrows flew quickly: Salinger's New York Times obituary contained an extended reference to two unflattering portraits (one from his daughter, Margaret) which writer Bruce Weber summarizes as adding "creepy" elements to the Salinger history:

"Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). Ms. Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box."

It's simple to say that most writers write to be read; Salinger's reputation rests on astounding success with, in total, four published works and a lengthy novella in The New Yorker. That's certainly plenty enough to say that Salinger achieved as much as he wished, reached what is charmingly called "an audience" and then -- suddenly -- publicly withdrew. In the New York Times obituary the author is quoted from 1974: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

Point taken. The rest is cantankerous silence, apparently. Readers and the publishing world can tease themselves that they may eventually find a key to the bottom drawer of Salinger's desk; maybe the key is resting forever with Salinger, there in his suitcoat pocket. If he has any last, lone word about it, the author won't be breaking silence any time soon.

American letters makes heroes of its voluble writers. Many despite the ravages of drink, drugs or age created a lifetime's worth of published work: Twain, Faulkner, Wolfe, Fitzgerald; Hemingway's novels have a bar-room talker's bark. Salinger is frequently mentioned in their company, but in death his purposeful career of disengagement may make his unpublished work -- if it does ever surface -- an interesting aside to his privacy, not a part of his genius.

(drawing of J.D. Salinger from Time magazine, 1961; photo of the author at a car window, 1990s, courtesy of Philadelphia CityPaper.)

"Planet Drum" (1991): Mickey Hart & Frederic Lieberman

Mickey Hart, drummer for the Grateful Dead since 1967 in its many incarnations, should know a thing or two about percussion.

Now 65, he's participated in various projects at the Smithsonian Institution and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, among others, including studies in the role of music in healing and health. Hart's 1991 book, Planet Drum: A Celebration of Percussion and Rhythm, which he co-authored with Fredric Lieberman, is a wide-ranging survey of the big beat heard around the world and its place in history and culture.

Percussion is an old, old sound that goes way, way back: the big bang at the beginning of the universe is "beat one;" the rest, according to Joseph Campbell quoted here, is "a fragmentation in the field of time."

Long before rock'n'roll records were smashed and trashed because of their primitive beats, Buddhist monks coming into Tibet performed their religious practice without drums -- to distinguish themselves from the magicians and shamans of Bon, an older Tibetan religion and its drumming rituals given by the gods.

"Tsong Khapa asked Chumbu, 'Why do you use the drum? You know we don't use drums because that's the way of shamans.' Chumbu replied, 'I do it for Mahakala. He likes it.' Tsong Khapa was not convinced. He said, 'Try not using it for a while, and see if there's any difference. Personally, I think it's a superstition, and you don't really need it.' So Chumbu stopped using the damaru. But he felt unhappy and never saw a trace of Mahakala. Everybody was miserable. When Tsong Khapa returned he asked, 'Was there a difference?' Chumbu replied, 'There was a great difference! Mahakala didn't like it, and I don't like it. So, please, let's go back to using the drum again.' Tsong Khapa then reinstated the use of drums again in ritual."

Congas played by Francesco Aguabella, 1988

It's myth-making on a grand scale, and stories like this run throughout Planet Drum's pages: the Buddhists learned to incorporate the power of rhythm (and symbolism) in the instrument called the damaru. The book quotes Buddhist teacher Tarthang Tulku:

"Buddhists don't get hung up on ancestral things. But an important reason we use bones -- human and animal -- in instruments such as the damaru, the thigh-bone trumpets, and in implements such as skull bowls, is to serve as continual reminders of impermanence and the immediacy of death. You know that death is close by, and death is an advisor. And you realize that your own bones will eventually be like this."

The full-page photo of "Priscilla," a 37-kiloton atomic bomb tested in 1957, brings home this point in an unexpected way.

While including an atomic bomb may be a stretch, it emphasizes Hart's busman's holiday of drumming that takes on all forms in Planet Drum, from the Russian bell called Tsar-Kolokol ("emperor of bells") to the rattle of sistras in Eithopia. It's a big, sometimes dizzying tour, both in time and place.

Ethiopian musicians playing the sistra, mid-1980s.

The book is a museum of photographs -- a bit jumbled at times, with timelines and text splashed across the pages -- but the scope of the book underscores the universal uses of sound and rhythm throughout human history: from the beginning, a mother's heartbeat is the first rhythm we know. In life, in religion, and in war, the beat strengthens ritual, enhances enjoyment, inspires devotion or fear.

"Just what do we find so attractive about rhythmically-controlled noise? Part of the answer is found in the nature of percussive noise. Loud! Sudden! It trips the switches in the oldest part of the brain, the part that quickly reacts with a fight-or-flight program, stimulating the release of adrenaline ... we never feel so alive as when the adrenaline is flowing."

Hart calls drumming "our musical skeleton key" -- an appropriate metaphor for someone still Grateful after all these years, in whatever shapes the Dead are still performing. It's almost April -- another spring season, with warm weather and green days ahead; time to celebrate renewal, rattle those pots and pans, time again to shake that old bag of bones. Twirling is optional.

(Images from Planet Drum, 1991)