The Beauty Around You

I have another blog called Beauty and the Beholder. I thought yesterday's post on that blog would be a good exercise here as well. Check it out, and leave a comment about your favorite things of beauty.

Coming soon: more features

Happy Memorial Day

On this holiday and every day of the year, I am grateful for this country. And I'm grateful for the many people who sacrificed their lives for the freedoms we have. What a tremendous gift!

Quotations

I found these quotations in Leonard Sweet's Soul Salsa. I like them and thought I'd pass them along.

“A true artist always puts something of his time in his art, and also his soul.” French sculptor Auguste Rodin

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Heav’n above is softer blue
Earth around is sweeter green;
Something lives in every hue
Christless eyes have never seen.” from George Wade Robinson hymn, I am His and He is Mine

“He who has eyes sees something in everything.” Roy Lichtenberg

Wilmer Mills, Part 3: Poet, Teacher, Carpenter

This is the conclusion of my feature with the poet Wilmer Mills.

To hear Wil read two poems, click here.
To read more of the essay he excerpts in our interview, click here.
To see some of his paintings, click here.


LeAnne: In addition to being a poet, you're also a carpenter. Has creating with your hands also helped you create with words and vice versa?

Wil: I have done a lot of carpentry, but I no longer do it professionally. I built my own house and am forever doing projects on it. They never seem to end. Working with my hands is the most important activity for stimulating my creativity. It is what makes me most human and also what puts me closest into contact with my creator. I also believe that working with my hands taps into a separate kind of human intelligence. There is the usual I.Q. kind; I often feel very deficient in that area. But when I work with my hands, I feel a broadening of connection-making ability. I am able to see how things fit together, how things work in a series of steps, almost how a story fits together. Yes, it’s all very narrative. I don’t think, though, that working with words has helped me work better with my hands. I think it only works the other way around. Manual dexterity or activity stimulates mental facility, not the reverse.

LM: You're also a teacher on a fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill. What has teaching students to write taught you?

WM: It has taught me how much I still don’t know. I never wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to work with my hands. But I couldn’t make a living that way and teaching has been my salvation. This has been a great surprise to me, because of how much I love it and for how much I learn by teaching. I’ve learned more about poetry by teaching in two years than I have in fifteen years of writing. Having to explain something forces one to learn the material in a deeper way. I hope to be able to continue teaching poetry.

LM: What would you like for your students to know when they leave your classroom?

WM: I teach my students how to construct a good line of verse both in strict meter and with lively and compelling syntax. Poetry is built out of lines, not feelings. When they learn how to build a good line, when they know the rules, then they can learn how to break them in intelligent ways, something that is essential for formal poetry, but especially for free verse, which, by definition, depends on variation. If you don’t have a grasp of regularity, your variation or “freedom” from a norm has no meaning.

I teach them to develop their ears to pick up the rich musical possibilities of language and how to channel that music through accurate observations of the real world around them. Too often, student poets think that writing a poem is about constructing an elaborate riddle with words, and that their job is to give cryptic clues to what the meaning is. This is at the root of most horrible poetry. If given the choice between the subtlety of mystery and the enigma of the mysterious, they will invariably choose the latter and drip it with oozings from their psyches.

I teach them to get out of their own heads, to stop thinking that poetry is a soapbox for self-expression. Poetry is about expressing the dictionary. Once they catch on, they realize that words are more intelligent than people are, and that words do a much better job of expressing their feelings and thoughts. Let good language do the work. So I teach students to look at what they see right in front of them and to say what they see in the most compelling language. Poets should make sense and make it sing.

Wilmer Mills, Part 2: Poet, Collector of Words

This is the second of three parts of my feature on poet Wilmer Mills. Mills was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was graduated from The McCallie School in 1988 and The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee with a B.A. in English Literature in 1992. He received a Masters in Theology from Sewanee in 2005. His first book of poems, a chapbook, Right as Rain, was published by Aralia Press in 1999. His first full-length collection of poems, Light for the Orphans, was published by Story Line Press in 2002.Wilmer Mills has published poems in The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, The New Criterion, Shenandoah, Literary Imagination, and others. His poems have been anthologized in Penguin/Longman Anthology of Contemporary American Poets, 2004, and are forthcoming from The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets.Mills has worked as a carpenter, furniture maker, sawmill operator, artisan bread baker, white oak basket weaver, farmer, and a white water raft guide, and poetry teacher among other things. He lives with his wife, Kathryn, and their two children in a bungalow he built himself in Sewanee, Tennessee. But he currently teaches poetry at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he is their Kenan Visiting Writer.

To hear Wil read two poems, click here.
To read more of the essay he excerpts in our interview, click here.
To see some of his paintings, click here.


LeAnne: Describe your creative process. 

Wil: I’m a linguistic bower bird. I collect words, bits of conversation, road signs, etymologies, etc. I write down what I find in a pocket notebook, and these bits and pieces then germinate in my mind and slowly settle into the lines of my poems. Whole poems grow out of certain images on their own. I don’t go after poems. They come to me as sonic excitement clicking in the syllables. I wait for the idea, the thing, the moment--wait until it appears already packaged in the phonetic music that will make it sing.
Then, ironically, what writes a poem is the syntax. Once I latch onto the right syntactical pattern (a tone, a pacing of clause, subject, and verb), the poem basically writes itself, pulling the subject matter along through the meter, sometimes in rhyme. It is important not to force the language to go where you want it to go, but to listen to it and let it guide you. The word “author” is descended from the same word as “augur,” meaning “seer.” A poet’s job is to see things, to point out the obvious that other people don’t see, not to reinvent reality with some hokus-pokus romantic notion of “inspiration” or creativity. That’s called disappointing the obvious. Once I have a draft of a poem, I sometimes spend years revising it. That’s when the real writing takes place.

LM: Tell me about your book of poems.

WM: In 1999, I published a small chapbook called Right as Rain by Aralia Press. In 2002, my full-length book of poems, Light for the Orphans, was published by Story Line Press. The press is now out of business, and my book is out of print, but used copies can still be found. Many of the poems in that book are narratives, stories about imaginary characters. That means that I am also a fiction writer--only I do it in verse, not prose.

Recently I have begun writing fiction in prose. A short story of mine was in the April issue of Image.

More from Wilmer Mills on Monday.

Wilmer Mills, Poet

Wilmer Mills was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He graduated from The McCallie School in 1988 and The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee with a B.A. in English Literature in 1992. He received a Masters in Theology from Sewanee in 2005. His first book of poems, a chapbook, Right as Rain, was published by Aralia Press in 1999. His first full-length collection of poems, Light for the Orphans, was published by Story Line Press in 2002. Wilmer Mills has published poems in The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, The New Criterion, Shenandoah, Literary Imagination, and others. His poems have been anthologized in Penguin/Longman Anthology of Contemporary American Poets, 2004, and are forthcoming from The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets. Mills has worked as a carpenter, furniture maker, sawmill operator, artisan bread baker, white oak basket weaver, farmer, and a white water raft guide, and poetry teacher among other things. He lives with his wife, Kathryn, and their two children in a bungalow he built himself in Sewanee, Tennessee. But he currently teaches poetry at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he is their Kenan Visiting Writer.

To hear Wil read two poems, click here.
To read more of the essay he excerpts in our interview, click here.
To see some of his paintings, click here.

LeAnne: How did you get started in poetry?

Wil: The best way to answer this is by using an extract from an essay of mine that already answers this as best as I can.

My youthful epiphany that poetry was to be my major creative direction did not come like St. Paul's on the road to Damascus or like what the French call a coup de foudre, a lightning bolt. It was a gradual unfolding in my life the way that a story is told. I can look back to its beginning and see that a certain seed was planted in my adolescent mind. The sap was rising. The proverbial lights were coming on when, in the tenth grade, I was brought along by my mother and uncle to what would be my first literary event, a reading by Robert Penn Warren at Nichols State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana.

I was likely included because for several years my mother had been pulling wads of paper from the pockets of my dirty laundry. While bored in classes, I had written down thoughts and images, never admitting to myself that their lines about deer hunters and pickup trucks could be considered poems. At the time they were more a means of getting rid of perennial bouts of sadness that overtook me whenever I got a sense of things I didn't understand, feeling, nevertheless, the weight of their presence. It caused me to assume, at the worst, that there existed other territories of thought, places to which I was called, or even entitled, at best, like a young mallard on his first migration. Much later I learned that there were words for such feelings, most of them in foreign languages: Saudade, Sehnsucht, Hiraeth, Ahnung, all sentiments that have led many young writers into the production of copious drivel.

My earliest attempts were already far too much in that vein. To my credit I never expected anyone to read them and actually thought those wads of paper just got ground up in the washer and sent to the septic tank where they belonged. My mother only confessed years later to having saved them. My juvenile writing must have caused her to think that the Warren reading would inspire me or help shape my efforts. She was more right than she could have ever expected. But I had never heard of Robert Penn Warren and had never used the word "literary" to refer to anything. I knew what poetry was and liked it but felt no personal connection to it. My maternal grandfather, whose name was Robert, often recited Robert Service, Robert Frost, and Robert Burns. Not being named Robert myself I didn't feel called to be a poet or lover of poetry, so the presence of Robert Warren did nothing to change my assumption. I went along dutifully.

Unknown to my mother, my dominant creative outlet at the time was not poetry but painting, not so much what I drew or painted on my own but how I thought about art. Whatever interest I had in poetry was purely that it seemed to be a compatible medium to painting. Out of a reflex instilled in me by my grandfather, I had memorized Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright." In doing so I was compelled by the tone of the poem, which carried with it authority and a definitive social message about the land and culture of the United States. What also compelled me was how its tone and message dovetailed with its rhythm, something about the way the lines were put together.

After reading more by Frost, I compared his haunting narrative aesthetic to the texture of paintings by Andrew Wyeth whose works, while structured, dry brushed, and stark, seemed also vibrant with human stories of flesh and feeling. I could tell that in Wyeth's painting and in Frost's poetry the stories were told while following strict rules. I sensed that when such rules were mastered, the artist or poet was able to achieve a measure of freedom that rose above the rules. I wouldn't have been able to articulate this too clearly then, but I thought about it a lot and my early fascination with stylistics was the result of a strange rebelliousness, the likes of which had nothing in common with the "acting out" of my contemporaries. I was looking for ways of embracing submission to stylistic authority and tradition so as to gain artistic freedom from them.

Toward this end I secretly wanted to be a watercolor painter because technique in that medium, when done well, involves getting a thought or response to nature on paper quickly and exactly in a practiced gesture of the hand. The technique takes skill that, after becoming second-nature, releases you from technique. You strive toward realism but to do so must employ significant impressionistic skills, downright abstraction, to suggest reality. So watercolor, to me, promised in an unsuspecting way to be more accurate and true-to-nature than oil painting, which seemed to require much more revision and repainting to get right.

But in one evening Warren changed my field of vision from painting to poetry. It wasn't so much Warren's poetry that initially affected me. I mean no condescension to his talent. It's just that at the time I would have been outright embarrassed to say anything out loud about art, much less poetry, so what moved me was seeing that oak of a man stand up in front of grown people and read poems. It was the equivalent in my mind of the small change in sunlight that causes whole continents of birds to fly somewhere else. Warren's poem, "Audubon: A Vision," particularly moved me. The painter, John James Audubon, had lived and painted birds only minutes from my family's land in Louisiana. I had grown up hearing the name and knew that my ancestors would have almost certainly had dealings with him. The last section of Warren's poem about him made me want to be a poet.


"Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse. I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart."


These lines didn't strike me as a poem, though I'm certainly not saying they don't constitute one. I just mean that I was mainly aware of them hitting me as powerful writing should: like a truck. The fact that there wasn't an underlying metrical structure in the poem didn't bother me. While I was compelled by the rhythms in Frost I didn't yet know what the word "meter" was, iambic pentameter and such things, and the term "free verse" had no meaning to me. Frost and Warren both had an explosive impact on me, even though I could tell they were not in the same vein, like two oak trees of the same genus but of different species. Warren inspired me to look for the acorn in myself. Frost made it grow. While I cannot claim to be an oak, much less of the same variety and stature of Frost or Warren, I have at least become some kind of sapling. The fact that I have taken root in the forest of Frost does not diminish my awe and respect for Warren in the least. The end of the Audubon poem reads, "Tell me a story of deep delight," and this may be utter silliness but I have taken that as an exhortation as if given to me personally as a charge. It is my motto as a writer. I met Warren that night. He asked me where I was from. When I told him North of Baton Rouge, south of St. Francisville in an area called The Plains he said, “there are good people there.”

More from Wilmer Mills on Thursday.

Secular Music--or Sacred?

On Christianity Today, I came across an article by John J. Thompson, a Christian music insider who has been an artist, critic, retailer, fan and label executive. Thompson discusses the power of music and addresses the oft-asked question: is music secular or sacred or neither? He says, "We should stop trying to define a dividing line, because when it comes to music, it's all spiritual." Check it out.

Imago

Do you know about Imago?

Begun over 30 years ago, Imago is a faith-based organization that seeks "to engage in promoting artistry of high caliber that will be both enrich and carry positive influence on the Canadian cultural landscape." Check out their website here.