When the University of Arkansas Press asked if I would act as editor for the coming year’s annual poetry prize named in honor of Miller Williams—the long-time director of the press and its poetry program—I was quick to accept. Since 1988 when he published my first full-length book, The Apple That Astonished Paris, I have felt indebted to Miller, who died in January 2015 at the age of eighty-four. From the beginning of his time at the press, it was Miller’s practice to publish one poet’s first book every year. Then in 1990 this commitment was formalized when Miller awarded the first Arkansas Poetry Prize. Fittingly, it was renamed the Miller Williams Poetry Prize after his retirement.
When Miller first spotted my poetry, I was forty-six years old with two chapbooks only. Not a pretty sight.
I have him to thank for first carrying me across that critical line dividing no book from book, thus turning me, at last, into a “published poet.” I was especially eager to take on the task of selecting books (with the assistance of many invaluable screeners) for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize because it is a publication prize, which may bring to light other first books.
Miller Williams was more than my first editor. Over the years, he and I became friends, but even before my involvement with the press, he served as a kind of literary father to me. His straightforward, sometimes folksy, sometimes witty and always trenchant poems became to me models of how poems could sound and how they could go. He was one of the poets who showed me that humor could be a legitimate mode in poetry—that a poem could be humorous without being silly or merely comical. He also showed me that a plain-spoken poem did not have to be imaginatively plain. Younger poets today could learn much from his example, as I did.
Given his extensive and distinguished career, it’s surprising that Miller didn’t enjoy a more prominent position on the American literary map. As his daughter became well-known as a singer and recording artist, Miller became known to many as the father of Lucinda Williams. Miller and Lucinda even appeared on stage together several times performing a father-daughter act of song and poetry. And Miller enjoyed a bright, shining moment when Bill Clinton chose him to be the inaugural poet at his second inauguration in 1997. The poem he wrote for that day, “Of History and Hope,” is a meditation on how “we have memorized America.” In turning to the children of our country he broadens a nursery rhyme question by asking “How does our garden grow?” Occasional poems, especially for occasions of such importance, are notoriously difficult—some would say impossible—to write with success. But Miller rose to this lofty occasion and produced a winner. His confident reading of the poem before the nation added cultural and emotional weight to the morning’s ceremony.
Apart from such public recognitions, most would agree that Miller’s fuller legacy lies in his teaching and publishing career, which covered four decades. In that time, he published over a dozen books of his own poetry and literary theory. His literary work as poet and editor is what will speak for Miller in the years to come. The qualities of his poems make them immediately likeable and pleasurable. They sound as if they were spoken, not just written, and they show a courteous, engaging awareness of the presence of a reader. Miller knew that the idea behind a good poem is to make the reader feel something, rather than to merely display the poet’s emotional state, which usually boils down to some form of misery. Miller also possessed the authority of experience to produce poems that were just plain wise.
With these attributes in mind, I began the judging of this year’s prize. On the lookout for poems that Miller would approve of, that is, poems that seemed to be consciously or unconsciously in the Miller Williams School, I read and read. But in reading these scores of manuscripts, I realized that applying such narrow criteria would be selling Miller short. His tastes in poetry were clearly broader than the stylistic territory of his own verse; he published poets as different from one another as John Ciardi and Jimmy Carter. I readjusted and began to look for poems I thought Miller would delight in reading, instead of echoes of his own poems. Broadening the field of judgment brought happy results. It took some second-guessing, but I’m confident that Miller would enthusiastically approve of this year’s selections. The work of three very different poets, who have readability, freshness of language, and seriousness of intent in common, stood out from the stack of submissions.
Roy Bentley is a child of the movies. In one of the poems in Walking with Eve in the Loved City, this self-described “fat-kid eighth grader” is watching Bullitt for the third time straight while an impartial usher looks on. The distance between this Ohio boy stuffing himself with popcorn and Steve McQueen gunning his Mustang GT 390 collapses as the poem rises to an ecstatic celebration of “a communion of terrific car chases wherein thunderous / algorithms of horsepower rule.” In another poem, the hormonal uptick of adolescence caused by attending “Sex Ed classes / with our dads” is registered while the speaker watches Son of Frankenstein in his “pj’s at Gary Laberman’s house on Comanche Drive.” When he and his friends become sexually active, the poet is certain, “townspeople will start lighting torches.” These poems get where they’re going by way of long, loopy sentences dotted with references to high and low culture. Helpfully, Bentley is fond of titles that inform and orient the reader rather than obstruct entry to the poem. I appreciated “Saturday Afternoon at the Midland Theatre in Newark, Ohio” almost as much as I did “Ringo Starr Answers Questions on Larry King Live about the Death of George Harrison.” And poems about Rimbaud and Robert E. Lee anchor us in history then set us adrift in the poet’s revisionist take on these glorified figures. This is a lively collection that instructs, delights, and uplifts.
When asked how to account for the distinctive guitar work of the Rolling Stones, Ron Wood said, “I think it’s a bit like the ancient art of weaving.” This is a skill that Scott Cunningham knows well (and even acknowledges in an epigraph), for several of his poems make a variety of designs by braiding together strands of their own lines. In one poem titled “Fugue 52” (implying there are more to come), and in another, a sonnet sequence titled “Now a Word about Twentieth-Century Music,” repeated lines are used as threads and connective tissue to hold the poems in tight order. That Morton Feldman, the composer, makes Zelig-like appearances in both of these poems should come as no coincidence because the poems themselves exhibit a musical structure, though thankfully not as complexly experimental as that of a Feldman composition. The collection, Ya Te Veo, offers many other delights including a wiggy explanation of how the New York School was formed and an updated, parodic version of “Dover Beach” that comes out of the box with “The sea is a bomb tonight.” Also notable is a poem about a victim of the Salem witch trials, Giles Corey, who was put to death by a now mercifully shelved method called “pressing,” in which the victim lies under a board, which is then loaded with heavier and heavier stones until a confession or death is achieved. “More weight,” Corey memorably demands from his executioners. And don’t miss “Poems about Concentration for People Who Can’t Concentrate,” perhaps a distant cousin of Geoff Dyer’s essay collection Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It. A sample: “You’re at your desk. / You can’t concentrate. / Imagine if not concentrating / was concentrating.” In sum, a distinctive collection by a very savvy poet.
What often lures us into poems and keeps our interest is the poet’s sensibility, that intangible element that arises from a poet’s tone, his or her verbal personality. That is what hooked me when I began to read Narcissus Americana. Travis Mossotti’s tone is a mixture of irony and true feeling, or rather a balancing act between the cool of one and the warmth of the other. Here’s a poet who laments the absence of poets getting drunk in their poems, “like William Matthews did.” A smart, informed melancholia can be found in many of these poems, including an exclamatory ode to condoms that is peppered with Shelley-like Os, and a poem detailing an encounter at a concert with a woman whose life and body are ruined by meth—a poem that ends surprisingly with the ceiling of the famous chapel whose name rhymes with hers: Christine. I trust this poet who can tell the tenor from the vehicle and whose poem “Cigar” shows us that many times a cigar is not just a cigar. Mossotti can also produce a narrative adventure, as he does in “Abandoned Quarry,” where diving underwater at night conveys a cinematic level of excitement and tension. Producing poems that are clear and mysterious, funny and serious, Travis Mossotti is one of a thriving group of American poets writing these days whose work exposes the mendacity of those who cite “difficulty” as an excuse for not reading poetry.
In short, we have here a gathering of poets whose work, I think, would have fully engaged and gladdened Miller Williams. Because I have sat with him there, I can picture Miller in his study turning these pages, maybe stopping to make a pencil note in a margin. Miller’s hope, of course, was that the poems published in this series would find a broad readership, ready to be delighted and inspired. I join my old friend and editor in that wish.
Billy Collins