What do you think?
Rate this book
Making a Poem: Some Thoughts about Poetry and the People Who Write It
"We need poetry as we need love and company," according to Miller Williams. Making a Poem speaks to us all -- those of us trying to write a first poem, those who have published volumes of poetry, and anyone who cares how the world and language fit together. Distinguished as a poet, a teacher, a scholar, and a publisher, Williams traverses a wealth of topics. He explores poetic techniques of line break, rhythm and meter, and the development of verse forms. In our technological age, he makes clear that poetry is essential to the human soul, showing the connection between scientists and humanists. Williams draws from experience to describe the importance of teaching poetry to prisoners, the value of the university and the small press in fostering poetry, and the relationship between writer and editor. Making a Poem is an intimate, conversational treatise on poetry by a man of letters with decades of practice in both the business and the craft of verse. Readers will take away from this delightful book a deeper appreciation of the poet's art and the vital role poetry can play in their everyday lives.
136 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2006
3 people are currently reading
37 people want to read
About the author
Miller Williams
45 books16 followersDied January 1, 2015.
Miller Williams is an American contemporary poet, as well as a translator and editor. He has authored over 25 books and won several awards for his poetry. His accomplishments have been chronicled in Arkansas Biography. He is perhaps best known for reading his poem "Of History and Hope" at the second inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1997.
Williams was educated in Arkansas, first enrolling at Hendrix College in Conway and eventually transferring to Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, where he published his first collection of poems, Et Cetera, while getting his bachelor's degree in biology. He went on to get a masters in zoology at the University of Arkansas in 1952.
He taught in several universities in various capacities, first as a professor of biology and then of English literature, and in 1970 returned to the University of Arkansas as a member of the English Department and the creative writing program. In 1980 he helped found the University of Arkansas Press, where he served as director for nearly 20 years. He is currently a professor emeritus of literature at the University of Arkansas.
Williams is the father of Lucinda Williams, a three-time Grammy Award winning country music, folk, and rock singer, named "America's best songwriter" by TIME magazine in 2002.
Miller Williams is an American contemporary poet, as well as a translator and editor. He has authored over 25 books and won several awards for his poetry. His accomplishments have been chronicled in Arkansas Biography. He is perhaps best known for reading his poem "Of History and Hope" at the second inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1997.
Williams was educated in Arkansas, first enrolling at Hendrix College in Conway and eventually transferring to Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, where he published his first collection of poems, Et Cetera, while getting his bachelor's degree in biology. He went on to get a masters in zoology at the University of Arkansas in 1952.
He taught in several universities in various capacities, first as a professor of biology and then of English literature, and in 1970 returned to the University of Arkansas as a member of the English Department and the creative writing program. In 1980 he helped found the University of Arkansas Press, where he served as director for nearly 20 years. He is currently a professor emeritus of literature at the University of Arkansas.
Williams is the father of Lucinda Williams, a three-time Grammy Award winning country music, folk, and rock singer, named "America's best songwriter" by TIME magazine in 2002.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 18, 2017
This is a thoughtful, indeed, an intriguing commentary on the poetic arts. Poets and lovers of poetry alike can learn much from Miller Williams’ assessments of both the techniques and the pyrotechnics of writing poetry.
Here is a blatantly brief summary: a formal metrical, rhymed poem is a poem. Let’s move on.
Williams offers a deadening, technical reference to so-called free verse. He doesn’t really discuss it or evaluate it in any substantial way.
This is a grand disappointment for me, because Williams achieves so much less than he promises.
His grand aim is to illuminate the making of poetry, but in the matter of free verse, he almost literally says nothing about the heart of the poem as he slogs through a recitation of most of the poet’s techniques that are not incorporated in free verse. He ignores any recognition of the varieties of poetic meaning and impact that are facilitated—indeed, augmented—by free verse.
I won’t quarrel for hours with Williams about his definition of free verse: everything that isn’t “formal poetry” with “a set metrical pattern and usually with rhyme.”
Of course, some poems have more regular and persistent meter, and some have less, even none; some poems are more rigidly and mechanically rhymed than others, and some are a mile away from a rhyme. On this Williams and I have cozy agreement.
Nevertheless, Williams’ polite and professional disdain for free verse is obvious. His definition is superficial, and it does not satisfy.
Read more of my reviews and poems here:
http://richardsubber.com/
Here is a blatantly brief summary: a formal metrical, rhymed poem is a poem. Let’s move on.
Williams offers a deadening, technical reference to so-called free verse. He doesn’t really discuss it or evaluate it in any substantial way.
This is a grand disappointment for me, because Williams achieves so much less than he promises.
His grand aim is to illuminate the making of poetry, but in the matter of free verse, he almost literally says nothing about the heart of the poem as he slogs through a recitation of most of the poet’s techniques that are not incorporated in free verse. He ignores any recognition of the varieties of poetic meaning and impact that are facilitated—indeed, augmented—by free verse.
I won’t quarrel for hours with Williams about his definition of free verse: everything that isn’t “formal poetry” with “a set metrical pattern and usually with rhyme.”
Of course, some poems have more regular and persistent meter, and some have less, even none; some poems are more rigidly and mechanically rhymed than others, and some are a mile away from a rhyme. On this Williams and I have cozy agreement.
Nevertheless, Williams’ polite and professional disdain for free verse is obvious. His definition is superficial, and it does not satisfy.
Read more of my reviews and poems here:
http://richardsubber.com/
August 3, 2020
Interesting essays on poetry, literature, publishing, writing.
Here is one poem referred to in the book:
TODAY I WAS SO HAPPY, SO I MADE THIS POEM
by James Wright
As the plump squirrel scampers
Across the roof of the corncrib,
The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,
And I see that it is impossible to die.
Each moment of time is a mountain.
An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,
Crying
This is what I wanted.
Here is another:
Strangers in this City Where We Have Come Seeking a Cure for Her Cancer, My Daughter and I Drive Up to the Clinic
by Jo McDougall
A buzzard lands on the roof .
In the dusk, in my confusion,
I mistake it for a blue
heron. I call to my daughter, "Look!"
And the author's follow up poem:
Oaks
by Jo McDougall
When friends came,
bringing food and sympathy,
I asked them to speak of my daughter
in the present tense.
When I visited her grave,
the oak trees,
casting their ferny shadows,
set me straight.
Robert Frost was once asked if he really paid attention to all those "technical things." He responded, "Madam, I revel in them."
Miller Williams: "One of the little-noted and overlooked advantages of rhyme is the way in which it broadens the poet's net for language. The search for a rhyme leads a poet not infrequently to come across words that otherwise would not have been considered for the poem at hand and that in turn can take the poem in delightfully surprising directions."
Rhyme also provides a mnemonic quality to poems that makes them easy to memorize.
The Common Wisdom
by Howard Nemerov
Their marriage is a good one. In our eyes
What makes a marriage good? Well, that the tether
Fray but not break, and that they stay together.
One should be watching while the other dies.
". . . if the poem is not properly resolved, it will feel as if the floor as suddenly fallen away. Many of the means of resolving a poem lie in the handling of form and the expectation that form has raised: the introduction of a longer or shorter line than expected, a tightened of the poem's established meter, modification of the rhyme pattern, returning to a rhyme scheme or stanza form after deviating from it. Without that form raises some of the best means of resolution are lost."
Comment on T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock": ". . . perhaps the single most important poem of [the twentieth century] written in English, as an example of how powerful free verse can be. It is, in fact, an example of how effectively a good poet can disguise established patterns. 'Prufrock' is NOT free verse but tightly blank verse with the five-stress lines frequently broken into two or three feet or one and four feet, these scattered about the poem, with scattered rhyme throughout, and with the standard blank verse resolving device of a rhymed couplet. I recommend this sort of thing, experimenting with set forms . . . as a rewarding way to rediscover the forms and the good uses of patterns in poetry."
"Every act of writing is an excursion into memory."
". . . In fact, lines of plain detailed description--of an old building or a field of flowers or of a mountain range or how one picks strawberries--can be deadly to a poem . . . . One focused image or one sweeping suggestion will do a lot more to keep a poem your own than will detailed description. Remember that suggestion always triggers the imagination; description almost never does."
"Read contemporary poetry . . . and poetry of the tradition."
". . . avoid stock adjective-noun combinations and stale comparisons."
"Try making your poem a narrative, perhaps a dramatic monologue, rather than the momentary expression of an emotion."
"Let the tale of the dramatic monologue be about someone other than the poet. . . ."
" . . . avoid the depiction of any character in the poem as a 'good guy' or 'bad guy.' Every believable character is complex."
"Be true to your sense of yourself."
"While you are being true to yourself, avoid running on about yourself, and especially avoid intimate revelations."
"You simply have to be sure the 'I' in the poem--ostensibly you--is so emblematic of humanity that most any reader would assume that role, could be that 'I'."
"To make this more likely, you have to free yourself from bondage to the facts. . . . Poetry is not journalism; it's an art form. . . . as John Ciardi paraphrased Picasso 'A poem lies its way to the truth.' . . . a poem has to invent its way to originality."
" . . . the poem has to sound interesting. . . . It's important to read each poem over, aloud, to work on the words until the sounds of the poem read aloud are satisfying, until they would be a pleasure to someone who didn't understand the language."
Here is one poem referred to in the book:
TODAY I WAS SO HAPPY, SO I MADE THIS POEM
by James Wright
As the plump squirrel scampers
Across the roof of the corncrib,
The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,
And I see that it is impossible to die.
Each moment of time is a mountain.
An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,
Crying
This is what I wanted.
Here is another:
Strangers in this City Where We Have Come Seeking a Cure for Her Cancer, My Daughter and I Drive Up to the Clinic
by Jo McDougall
A buzzard lands on the roof .
In the dusk, in my confusion,
I mistake it for a blue
heron. I call to my daughter, "Look!"
And the author's follow up poem:
Oaks
by Jo McDougall
When friends came,
bringing food and sympathy,
I asked them to speak of my daughter
in the present tense.
When I visited her grave,
the oak trees,
casting their ferny shadows,
set me straight.
Robert Frost was once asked if he really paid attention to all those "technical things." He responded, "Madam, I revel in them."
Miller Williams: "One of the little-noted and overlooked advantages of rhyme is the way in which it broadens the poet's net for language. The search for a rhyme leads a poet not infrequently to come across words that otherwise would not have been considered for the poem at hand and that in turn can take the poem in delightfully surprising directions."
Rhyme also provides a mnemonic quality to poems that makes them easy to memorize.
The Common Wisdom
by Howard Nemerov
Their marriage is a good one. In our eyes
What makes a marriage good? Well, that the tether
Fray but not break, and that they stay together.
One should be watching while the other dies.
". . . if the poem is not properly resolved, it will feel as if the floor as suddenly fallen away. Many of the means of resolving a poem lie in the handling of form and the expectation that form has raised: the introduction of a longer or shorter line than expected, a tightened of the poem's established meter, modification of the rhyme pattern, returning to a rhyme scheme or stanza form after deviating from it. Without that form raises some of the best means of resolution are lost."
Comment on T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock": ". . . perhaps the single most important poem of [the twentieth century] written in English, as an example of how powerful free verse can be. It is, in fact, an example of how effectively a good poet can disguise established patterns. 'Prufrock' is NOT free verse but tightly blank verse with the five-stress lines frequently broken into two or three feet or one and four feet, these scattered about the poem, with scattered rhyme throughout, and with the standard blank verse resolving device of a rhymed couplet. I recommend this sort of thing, experimenting with set forms . . . as a rewarding way to rediscover the forms and the good uses of patterns in poetry."
"Every act of writing is an excursion into memory."
". . . In fact, lines of plain detailed description--of an old building or a field of flowers or of a mountain range or how one picks strawberries--can be deadly to a poem . . . . One focused image or one sweeping suggestion will do a lot more to keep a poem your own than will detailed description. Remember that suggestion always triggers the imagination; description almost never does."
"Read contemporary poetry . . . and poetry of the tradition."
". . . avoid stock adjective-noun combinations and stale comparisons."
"Try making your poem a narrative, perhaps a dramatic monologue, rather than the momentary expression of an emotion."
"Let the tale of the dramatic monologue be about someone other than the poet. . . ."
" . . . avoid the depiction of any character in the poem as a 'good guy' or 'bad guy.' Every believable character is complex."
"Be true to your sense of yourself."
"While you are being true to yourself, avoid running on about yourself, and especially avoid intimate revelations."
"You simply have to be sure the 'I' in the poem--ostensibly you--is so emblematic of humanity that most any reader would assume that role, could be that 'I'."
"To make this more likely, you have to free yourself from bondage to the facts. . . . Poetry is not journalism; it's an art form. . . . as John Ciardi paraphrased Picasso 'A poem lies its way to the truth.' . . . a poem has to invent its way to originality."
" . . . the poem has to sound interesting. . . . It's important to read each poem over, aloud, to work on the words until the sounds of the poem read aloud are satisfying, until they would be a pleasure to someone who didn't understand the language."
March 13, 2009
A rich, if somewhat brief collection of essays on poetry (most previously published) in Miller Williams plainspeak we have come to love.
I adore Miller Williams, and there are some great nuggets to be had in this slim volume. Unfortunately I didn't find them great enough to warrant the hefty cover price, but ultimately Williams is worth it.
I adore Miller Williams, and there are some great nuggets to be had in this slim volume. Unfortunately I didn't find them great enough to warrant the hefty cover price, but ultimately Williams is worth it.
July 12, 2016
Lots to ponder in this little book. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of the line in poetry, as well as his essay on science and the humanities, where he asserts that the real distinction is between those who seek to impose order on the universe vs those who seek to find a natural order under the chaos.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews