Battle Creek, MI - wherein the author makes some new friends
It’s 7 pm or so after I check into the Hampton Inn in Battle Creek, Michigan. When I drove in earlier, I was knocked out to see about 30 vintage cars in the parking lot, Fords, Chryslers, all primo condition, detailed, etc. A big sign in the lobby advertises this weekend as the National Street Rod convention.
After getting settled, I decide to run out and make some very bad food choices at the closest place with a drive-thru. As I emerge from the front door, a 50ish guy with a baseball cap comes right over at me. “Hey, are you the guy who bought the Packard?” He’s closing in, got his hand stretched out, so I have to shake it before I say, “Uh, no.”
He hooks one arm around my back and keeps shaking as he says: “Oh, shit, sorry. But you gotta see this, my pal just sold his ’44 Packard for 18 grand…I thought you were the guy…you look just like him.”
Now, this is all happening at light speed, so he’s got me away from my car and headed toward the back corner of the hotel parking lot. It’s daylight, he’s not especially threatening, and I am street tough like Allen Iverson, so after I unloose myself from his grip I keep walking along with him.
Two guys are waiting by a purple roadster of some kind. My baseball cap friend points at a fat guy with a beard and says, “My buddy here sold his ’44 Packard to some guy for 18 grand…show him the money.”
The beard pulls out a wad of cash about the size of a box of Pop-Tarts and shows me enough hundreds to make me think it might be true.
Then the third guy, a young guy pulls out a stack of 20s. “Hey,” he says to me, “This guy was going to show me a game. Watch if you want.”
So, the four of us are all there in a sort of tableau, alongside I-94, half behind the Hampton Inn. Beard, young guy, baseball cap, and me.
Beard suddenly reaches behind a bush and pulls out the top of a cardboard box. He lays it on the hood of the roadster and pulls out three playing cards, all bent in half, lengthwise.
This is three card monte, obviously. If you live in any decent sized city, you can find these guys on the occasional street corner. Three card monte isn’t really a card game at all, but a sort of scam. The American version is based on a similar game called Bonneteau. The dealer shows you three cards, two of one color, one of the other. Usually it’s a couple of matching face cards, say the queens of clubs and spades, and an opposite ace, like the ace of hearts or diamonds. The trick is, the dealer shows you the object card, the one that’s different, then shuffles or tosses them around on a flat surface, face down. When he stops, you pick out the ace and if you’re right you get $20. If not, you pay him.
So this all dawns on me suddenly. I’ve been roped in and the real show is about to start. The young guy has a $20 out. He’s waving it. He’s excited. He’s ready to win. He’s not afraid. The beard shows us all a red ace and two black queens. He starts moving the cards around slowly. It’s easy to keep up. He throws the card that we all know is the red ace to the far right, comically away from the others.
“THAT ONE,” the young guy says, and wouldn’t you know it, the beard turns over the red ace.
“See that,” baseball cap says, slapping me on the back, leaning against me hard enough to make me think he’s feeling for my wallet, or he’s just looking for some companionship on this nice September night.
The beard pays the kid $20 with a reluctant, aw shit kinda look that is admirable.
“Let’s go again,” beard says. “I’m going to get you.”
Then, the kid turns to me. “Hey, you wanna get it on this? You got $20?”
And we all wait. It’s one of those great slow-mo moments when you achieve a rare kind of clarity.
The three of them all look at me. The beard with his stack of cash. My new best friend with the baseball cap. And the young kid, the phony player who’s going to let me share in his great good fortune. I want to thank them all for involving me in the scam. I don’t want to fess up and let them know I’m not some rube. I’d like the scene to go on a little longer.
In my head I run through some of the available scenarios:
“What,” I could say. “Does it look like I have STUPID printed on my head?” Then they beat me with tire irons and take my wallet.
“You mean it, guys? I can really get it on this?” Then I lose $100 and there goes dinner.
So, I flatten my hands out, start backing away and utter the failsafe: “Uh, guys, my wife would kill me.”
Then I went to Arby’s and got myself enough roast beef for a high school football team. When I got back, my three buddies were leaning up against the roadster, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbons and watching the sun go down.
Orlando Ricardo Menes - South Bend, IN
Orlando's beautiful wife Ibis is 8 months, 3 weeks pregnant when I arrive in South Bend. This has been on my mind for the days that have led up to this part of the trip. I'm very grateful for the chance to meet and interview Orlando, but do not want my hurried and cacophonic visit to initiate childbirth during the interview. Should my beaming bald head and affable presence start proceedings later on, while I'm safely on the Interstate, then so be it. You had to know this was going to happen sometime!
The house is bustling with their daughter, with Ibis's mother, and yet another sweet dog. I'm sure this dog has a name, but my ability to recall events, places, names, etc. has completely lost me as I enter the final 24 hours of this trip. So, sweet dog in the Menes home, I'm afraid you will not get your due in this forum, but your kindness is noted all the same.
We visit over rich, dark coffee, cookies and cakes, then go down to the basement to Orlando's study. Books line both long walls on black bookshelves. Two lamps and a tiny ceiling height window provide the lighting. His laptop sits on a wide desk, and it's blinking throughout the conversation...what's happening, I keep thinking...information coming in or going out? It's a metaphor for my visits to all these poets. I come in, I download a lot of info, and I race out again, already trying to work the info into something else again to go on these pages.
While we talk, Orlando points out paintings by the Cuban born 19th century painter Valentin Sanz Carta, and a book of photos called Havana 1933 by photograph Walker Evans (famous for his depression-era photos of American farm workers). These are among some of the sources of inspiration that have fueled poems in the past. But nothing has fed Orlando's work more than what he calls the "mythic" Cuba of his youth, not a place where he lived, but the home of his family. Born in Peru, then relocated to a rich and lively Cuban neighborhood in Miami, Orlando learned to love Cuba through the refractive filters of his family. When he writes about this place, it's a sort of Cuba twice removed, a place that comes to be the poetic Cuba, a Cuba formed by those who know it and love it a variety of ways.
To add another filter to the work, Orlando first started to really write about his "homeland" while peering out a window in Chicago, Illinois, while working toward his Ph.D. And now, in Indiana, his work has continued to plumb places from his past, including Peru, where he was born and where he lived until he was ten years old.
As always, the visit is over before it gets started. I have other questions, other lines of thought, but Orlando has given me much to think about, and much to add to the growing repository of information about poets and their places.
We go to the backyard, squeezing past a porch full of toys that his daughter will have to share with the soon-arriving son. We shoot a few photos, and he walks me out to the truck. I think to myself, the baby can come now.
Lisa Samuels - Milwaukee, WI
I may have found my home here in Wisconsin. As I travel I-90 and I-94, cheese and meat shops appear on the horizon every now and again. Everything is called a Haus. Cheese Haus. Sausage Haus. When I see two on the same exit, I pull over faster than you can say "who has a big belly?"
The Cheese Haus looks full, but there's a place called Humbird right next to it, and it has a giant painted sign that seals the deal for me: "Fudge."
Three ladies are working the place. It looks like they've just opened fairly recently. Giant display freezers hug one wall, but they're new, and not especially tight to the walls. Some things have prices, but not all of them. The cash register is brand new, and one of the ladies is working it over like she was Mike Tyson.
I wander down the long section of the store where boxes of cookies and crackers stretch from head to toe. There are knick knacks, cups, pens, cheese graters, wine racks, etc. on the back wall. But when I turn the corner and come back to the front, I find a long refrigerated bin of every kind of cheese you can imagine. Many have "Wisconsin" in front of the cheese type. Wisconsin Longhorn. Wisconsin Gouda. I imagine this is a big selling point when you've got a store that relies on highway traffic for its business.
I pick up some Wisconsin Cheddar and some Wisconsin Colby Jack.
At the front, all three ladies are waiting for me. One looks up from the cash register and says, "I hope you're paying with credit card."
"You find what you need?" another one says.
Fudge, I think. "Fudge," I say. "Can I get some Wisconsin fudge?" I imagine that's pretty funny.
"Uh, we've got almond fudge, peanut butter fudge, white fudge. We've even got a new cheese fudge."
"Cheese fudge?"
"Tina, give him a taste."
Tina comes out from behind the counter and leads me over to another, smaller cooler. She picks up a giant round roll of fudge and scrapes a cheese grater across the top. It's just a sliver, but it's the size of a Monopoly bill.
Tina says, "It's made with cheddar."
"It's good," I say. "Give me enough for dessert."
At the front, I give my credit card, and before they run it through the machine, I grab a stick of salami. Then some crackers. I need crackers, good God. How can you have cheese, salami, and fudge, and no crackers.
I pay $19 for all of this. It's a snack. Isn't that a lot of money or a snack? Did I mention I've been driving all day?
Lisa Samuels lives in a 1927 house north of Milwaukee. It's on a busy road, but since she's been there she's put a row of some kind of noise-killing and pretty trees to buffer the noise. The house is gorgeous. Long driveway to the back. Porch. She lets me in the front and we talk houses and Milwaukee for a bit. We sit in a beautiful living room, all dark woods. A welcome and late afternoon shower is taking place, and the room has a grey, but pleasant feel.
I discovered Lisa's poetry fairly recently. The work is varied and exciting, seeming not to be tied to one or another type of method or approach. She's comfortable with long and short poems, even concrete and prose poems. And the language is always careful, literate. Dense one moment, then revealing in the next.
My earlier posting about the excellent lunch that Michael Dennis Browne provided me is reaping rewards. Lisa has an excellent microbrew beer from Milwaukee for me. I get the sense that if I wanted five more, I could get them, too, although then I'd have to sleep in the front yard.
We start with a discussion of her own places, places she's lived. It's quite a list: fifteen states, countries in the Middle East, a country in Scandinavia. She talks a lot about "empty" places where she's felt at home, like Yemen, or the Utah desert.
Lisa talks about an "otherness" that she feels in these places, a feeling of not fitting, like a piece of the wrong jigsaw puzzle. It's a feeling she likes, one that was clearly fostered and nurtured during her nomadic past.
As always, the hour passes quickly. She shows me her study, crowded with papers and manuscripts. "I know where everything is," she says, like I've said myself. We shoot some photos inside, and then she does yeoman's service by standing in the rain to get some outside, up against her house.
We say goodbye. She goes in the house, and I head to my car. Before I get back out onto the small road that will lead me to the Interstate, I have a marvelous recollection. There is fudge in here somewhere. In a suitcase or a bag is the last of yesterday's fudge.
Michael Dennis Browne - Minneapolis, MN
It's an odd thing, this interview game. I am walking into people's home and offices with a giant bag of equipment - that could just as easily contain rope, a mallet, and pepper spray - and I am being welcomed like a member of the family. (Maybe a distant cousin, but you get my drift.)
After about ten of these, I've gotten quite comfortable with the process. In the early ones, I'd arrive hours early, staking out the street, figuring out which house is 3120 Peacock Blvd. Where will I park? Will I have to carry my stuff over great distances? Does it look like the kind of house where they'll ask me to take off my shoes? Am I wearing the right kind of socks for that sort of thing? Is it possible that they are looking at me right now while my car idles in the street in front?
Now, I just get directions and pull up at the appointed time. I grab my bag of stuff and stride up to the place as though I were invited - which of course I am.
My interview today is with a poet I've met before. Michael Dennis Browne came to the campus of Southern Mississippi in 1985. At the time I was a boorish grad student, sure of myself, sure I was right about everything. I'd even - I'm much embarrassed to admit - developed a little phobia about contemporary poetry. Give me some Keats, but take anything from this century and get out of my way.
But as I student in the program I got drafted to go to Michael's reading. It was terrific. Michael's voice, a sturdy mixture of his boyhood England and his adulthood Minnesota, worked the poems in the best way. Not caressing the words, not inflating the language, not inspiring anything into them that wasn't already there. And the poems were worth the effort it took to read and hear them.
He finished with one of his more well known pieces, a gorgeous one called "Hide and Go Seek," which uses the childhood game as an extended metaphor for the growth, happiness, and safety of his nieces and nephews. The monsters of the contemporary world are mirrored by the monster the speaker plays in the waning daylight hours, and it ends with a plaintive, "All in. All in." It was simple. And it was beautiful. And I bought one of his books the next day.
And today I'm going right in the house. I tell Michael about the first time we met, and we sit facing each other at the kitchen table. The house is cluttered, and I mean cluttered in the sense of full. This is a house where kids and a black lab named Jamie move around a good deal. I see an Algebra book on one table. I see a big sheet over one couch for the dog.
Michael is getting lunch together for me. After hearing about my journey and its odd, vigorous schedule, he insisted I get something to eat other than "greasy road food." So he's walked to a local co-op to fetch tomato basil soup and a fine salad - with giant garbanzos in the bottom. He puts some bread in the oven as he gets the meal ready and we talk about the project. Like many of the folks I've met, Michael is envious of the trip and of the time I've got to to it. This is one thing all the poets I've met seem to share, a sort of wanderlust. New places means new ideas, new poems, new worlds.
We eat at our food, talking the whole while. We look out at the back yard where Jamie has obtained - Michael doesn't know how - a big bone of some kind. I think it looks like something a dinosaur or previous tenant might have left behind, but I'm not really good with anatomy - or whatever scientific field of endeavor applies.
Once we're done eating, we go out to Michael's shed, a wooden structure, literally, no bigger than 4X7. If you put 40 rolls of toilet paper in there, you wouldn't be able to close the door. But it's made for writing, not entertaining. The wood is all fence lumber. A big window opens to the southern sky, and a hand hewn desk falls out of the wall on little hinges. It's as empty as the house is full. Michael's glad to sit in it for me and I get a few pictures. It was built for $300 and it's one of a few places where Michael does his work.
The other place, the dream place, is a house up in the north woods of Minnesota, a cedar house with a screened in porch and a 24' foot peak. It's instructive to tell you that Michael shows me two pictures. One of his kids. One of his cabin.
We shake hands. Michael inquires about the next stop - it's Milwaukee - and once again I'm on the road.
Marvin Bell - Iowa City, IA
My friends who live in big cities have little understanding of the great middle of this country. This is not the greatest failing in the world, perhaps, but it's a failing nonetheless. There are terrific and fascinating places and people on every square inch of the map, and I can't think of a place that hasn't educated or entertained me in some way. Sure, for some lives, New York is the place to be. LA for others. I know many pals who swear by the South. Others won't leave the misty Pacific Northwest.
But I've never been afraid of the great expanse that Rand McNally and the fellas promise each year when the big Road Atlas comes rolling into my local Wal-Mart, and then into my car.
One of the reasons for this trip, in fact, was just for the sheer enjoyment of going all around the lower 48. I've been in all theses places before, but never in one swoop, so that's part of the challenge. But the real joy is the intoxicating combination of people and places and events that come rocketing through your life when you travel 65 mph pretty much all the time.
This stuns most people who know me in my straight life, because, for the most part, when at home or at work, I shun everything outside my immediate view. Want to go horseback riding? No. Want to bungee? No. Want to try this new thing? I hate new; leave me alone. I've got the curmudgeon thing down second nature, and that works for me when I'm wrapped up in my teaching, writing, watching lots of TV whatever.
But when I let myself open up a bit, and when my wife and I travel around, I'm always buzzing from the big and small things that I stumble into.
In Iowa City today, as I drove the quiet streets of this beautiful college town looking for Marvin Bell's home, I spotted this fat guy leaning up against a truck that advertised "critter removal." Two things. I have a strong affinity with the fat guys of the world. I'm fatter than Elvis. It's a strange brotherhood of fat guys the world over who bond to me - and me to them. The second thing is, any town with actual "critters" has got to be lively. Plus, I like the no-nonsense lingo.
So I pulled over in my truck and said hello.
"Critter trouble? What are you looking for?"
The guy hitched his pants in a familiar way and came over. "Lady here," hooking his thumb back, "says she's got a family of possums in the attic."
"Wow," I said. "Has she seen them."
"No, that's the thing. She's hearing them. I'm guessing she's got squirrels running on the roof. That's all. That'll send up a whale of a racket." He leans against the side of my truck, and wipes some sweat from his brow - my brother.
"What are you going to do?" I say.
"Well, if I can't convince her they're outside, I'll put some peanut butter up in the attic with some live traps."
"Peanut butter?" I say. "You catch possums with peanut butter?"
"Oh yeah, you can catch anything with peanut butter."
"That's funny," I say, "My wife caught me with peanut butter."
The guy laughs a big genuine laugh, not a timid one, not a wise chuckle, not a knowing huff. He likes it. He laughs big. He reaches out to shake my hand. "I got you," he says. "You live around here?"
"No," I say, pointing vaguely up ahead me and the street to Marvin Bell's house. "I'm just going through."
"Well," my big friend says, "have fun."
As I got back out on to the street, I could see the lady of the house coming out the front door, pointing up, and the guy headed to his truck for the goods.
Marvin Bell is a geographical champion. He lives in three different places during the year, a peninsula in Washington State, on far eastern Long Island, and in this home I'm visiting in Iowa City. And he's traveled, lived, and written in a score of other countries.
His memory for these places, and his understanding of their own particular sensibilities is deep. He grew up on Long Island, but finds himself "home" in the others as well. For thirty-five years he's been home in Iowa, although now he only spends half a year or so there as part of his position at the famed Iowa program.
We sit at a dining room table surrounded by books and CDs and art and greenery, a spooky mask of some kind, and a big bowl of fruit from which Marvin pulls out a banana to steel himself for the interview. The home is relaxed and inviting, and we settle in.
Marvin leads me through his geographical biography, and as he does, he easily pulls lines and poems from his work to show me where they were born, and how their place was integral in their creation. It's a nostalgic sort of trip, and it's clear I'm not the only one enjoying it - and learning from it.
We talk a bit about work habits, and he volunteers to show me a tiny 9X12 shed in the back yard where he wrote much of his early work. It's exactly the size someone would need for the task. A small single mattress, two circa 1940-1950 Royal typewriters, a desk lamp, and a buzzer that served as a sort of intercom in the days before wireless this and that. Marvin didn't tell me if the buzzer was used for him to let his wife Dorothy know something, or vice versa. As a married man, I can only guess.
In the shed is even a stack of paper, ready to go in one of the typewriters, but yellowed and covered with spider webs. I'm taking some pictures and Marvin rolls a sheet, sits in his chair, and takes the attitude of the gentleman poet at his task.
We go back into the house and up the stairs to his study, where an Apple laptop waits for him. This is where he works now. He sits at the desk in the same manner as he had in the shed, but I must confess he looked more natural in front of the manual machine. Marvin, I think, looks like a typewriter guy to me. And his poetry, long lines spilling out often beyond the margin of the page and looping back, feels like it should be made on a machine that makes a little noise. Something that presses ink into paper.
Scott Cairns - Columbia, MO
Having taught for the past three years at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, I've forgotten the sort of shock one gets when a giant university suddenly appears in a big town or small city.
I was casually meandering down a deserted Campus Blvd., arm out the window, sucking on a Pepsi, munching on a Rice Krispie treat (product placement opportunities), when I turned into campus and had my Nissan Pathfinder (an excellent vehicle, fun for the whole family) swallowed up by teeming groups of college students escaping at 50 minutes past the hour. Four lanes of traffic came to a dead stop as hundreds of book-bagged - and terribly thin, attractive, fresh-faced, YOUNG - students strolled across College Street toward unseen dorms, apartments, etc. Two kids played hackey-sack as they walked. One girl flipped off her flip flops right in the crosswalk, punched them into a purse, and never lost a beat in her cell phone conversation.
When I got through this group, and got onto campus, I got caught up in the intoxicating youth of the place. For me - someone who knows the value of a great, pessimistic lethargy - I didn't even let "intoxicating - yet fleeting - youth" enter my mind. Well, at least not until now.
But I walked longer than I might normally, just to soak all of it in. Young men with sleeveless shirts and earrings. Young women with earrings and sleeveless dresses. I peered in through the library windows and it was like looking at a college catalog: a group huddle around a gleaming computer, one older student showing a younger student the way to the stacks, the restrooms, the elevator, whatever. A professorial woman beaming out at me as I looked in.
Scott Cairns is waiting in his Tate Hall office for me. He's recently moved offices, so he's still in the honeymoon phase, shuffling books from case to case, looking for just the right angle for the desk. If it matters, the desk is perfect right now. When one walks in the door, the desk is at about 40 degrees off the mean, angled in such a way that as soon as you walk in, Cairns will be before you.
He's a genial guy, as interested in me and my questions as he is in answering them well. We talk about his background in Washington state, a place I love as well. We talk about his early work, which he identifies as being the most "place-oriented," but we get around eventually to something new for this trip - the spiritual.
Cairns has written for years as a part of a quest (my word) to come to an understanding of the presence (his word) of God. He notes that he's simply got a "God obsession," and that he is able to get glimpses of meaning through his own work. So he continues, and each poem helps him fill in the great unknowns in his own search.
Together we wonder if spiritual landscape fits the overall theme of this book project. And while we ponder it, Cairns talks a bit about the physical landscape of his youth, the mist and the mountains and the rocky beaches of the Pacific Northwest. In those places, overgrown, thick, heavy, and seemingly always shrouded in vapor, he found his way. How like that his work as a man?
WZ: 1947-2003
I heard the news this morning that songwriter Warren Zevon died last night.
Zevon - most well known for "Werewolves of London," a 1978 song that paid him well, but took its toll artistically for the rest of his career - was diagnosed last year with a rare and inoperable form of lung cancer. He was an anomaly, a literate rocker, a longtime favorite of critics and other artists - even "real" writers and poets - but terribly unknown except for the one song a quarter century ago.
All through his career he was a songwriter of rare imagination, one whose grim humor made his diagnosis painful and ironic. In an album before he learned he was sick (the sterling "Life'll Kill Ya,") he wrote: "From the President of the United States / To the lowliest rock and roll star / The doctor is in and he'll see you now / He don't care who you are."
I've been listening to Zevon since 1977, when a school pal lent me a copy of Zevon's self-titled second album. On that album, and on many of the ones that followed, Zevon distilled life in California, pouring that experience into his songs. I spend this time today on Zevon because my interest in poetry and places begins with the rock lyrics that consumed me beginning in my early teens. Zevon, Jackson Browne, Dylan, Springsteen, Rickie Lee Jones - among others - were the first poets I knew.
From "Warren Zevon," circa. 1976.
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Desperados Under the Eaves
I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was staring in my empty coffee cup
I was thinking that the gypsy wasn't lyin'
All the salty margaritas in Los Angeles
I'm gonna drink 'em up
And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill
Don't the sun look angry through the trees
Don't the trees look like crucified thieves
Don't you feel like desperados under the eaves
Heaven help the one who leaves
Still waking up in the mornings with shaking hands
And I'm trying to find a girl who understands me
But except in dreams you're never really free
Don't the sun look angry at me
I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was listening to the air conditioner hum
It went hmmm...
Look away...
Look away down Gower Avenue, Look away...
Copyright ©1976, Warner-Tamerlane/Darkroom Music BMI
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In the last year of his life, Zevon finished and released a terrific collection of songs called "The Wind." When my wife reached me on the road, I was hurtling up a small highway in Missouri. On the CD player was the first line of the first song of the last album he ever made:
"Sometimes I feel like my shadow's casting me."
Warren Zevon
1947-2003
Miller Williams - Fayetteville, AR
Were we to begin work on the American poetry version of Mount Rushmore, I’d like to volunteer to start work on the chunk that would become the face of Miller Williams. It’s a miraculous face, one that is wise and welcoming, genteel and grizzled, open, inquisitive, and always alive. (And, we share that rare biological gift of a brilliant, beautiful, and smooth cranial dome. I'd think this would require some extra buffing up on the mountain, but it'd be worth the effort.)
Miller's home - a virtual treasure trove, museum, and love letter to his family, his countless friends, and his work - makes a terrific place to meet. We repair to an airy porch off the side of the house, where the sound of a burbling fountain eases into the infrequent gaps of our conversation.
We talk about Miller’s Southern past, a biography of travel, civil rights protests, music, family, and love, that pours out in his lifetime of work.
He recalls for me some of the stories behind his poems, turning pages in a collection, running his finger along lines, sometimes – surprisingly – reading with a sure and soothing rhythm.
We spend some time in his study, where the photos of his friends and family peer down on him as he works his way through yellow legal pads of new work. (These pads he fills, sometimes an entire one to create a single piece.) While I click my camera, he sits in his writing chair and points out Presidents, musicians, poets, and pals on the walls. He points out his family, the ones ahead of him and the ones behind. It's a small room, but comfortable, and it buzzes with the lives that his work has touched.
While I work on my camera, Miller reaches to a small table on his left and starts paging through some pages of new poems. He reads one, then another. These are unpublished pieces, but finished in the best sense. The forms are graceful, the rhymes elegant and transparent. He sets the folder down and shows me some more photos of his family.
His work is broad, inviting, and always exacting. The poems require only that the reader is equipped with an open - and working - heart. The shorter poems spear an idea, carving to the very marrow of the idea. The longer poems drift and pull you into the world as Williams describes it: a hotel in St. Louis, a tavern in Tennesse, standing beside his granddaughter's crib, or at the death bed of an old friend.
The cumulative effect for a poet reading his collected work, Some Jazz a While, is a lesson in using only what is required. There is not a single unnecessary utterance. The poems have been pared to their essence, and they - too often to seem reasonable - shine.
But rather than wax rhapsodic about the poet, let me finish with a few words about a fine dog. The powerful and dominating Shih Tzu - Sister - who allows Miller and his wife to live in their home in Fayetteville, greets me as I arrive, follows me as I set up my recorder and cameras, but then goes about dog business while the humans talk around whatever it is that humans find to occupy their time.
I look for Sister as I leave, but she must be involved in larger matters. I load my truck, and am backing out when I see Miller smiling, and bringing the dog to me in his arms. Miller says, "When you left, she followed you to the door. I think she wants to say goodbye." And indeed, when Miller lifts her head into my window, Sister gives me a little kiss on the cheek, the perfect Southern hostess. As I release the brake, she tells Miller to take her back inside, and that's the last thing I see them do.
