Rest in Peace, Miller Williams

Miller Williams, the Arkansas poet asked to deliver a poem on the occasion of Bill Clinton's second inauguration and the father of Lucinda Williams, is dead at the age of 84. From The New York Times:

Miller Williams, a poet who championed the power of everyday language and who delivered a poem at the Capitol for President Bill Clinton’s second inauguration, died on Thursday in Fayetteville, Ark. He was 84.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said Linda Sheets, a family friend.

The father of the singer and songwriter Lucinda Williams, he would occasionally share the stage with her, reading his poetry between her songs.

Tall and thin, Mr. Williams was also economical of speech, but he loved to tell stories. He was admired in literary circles for his direct, plain-spoken style.

He was a workhorse, publishing 37 books of poetry and prose, both of his own and of others in translation, while also serving as a mentor to rising literary talents, including the poet Billy Collins. He taught at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville for more than three decades and was the founding director of the University of Arkansas Press. His home there was a salon for writers and others, with a guest bedroom that hosted both the hard-bitten poet Charles Bukowski and Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Williams’s gifts were spotted by major literary figures well before he was able to make a living off them. He began his career as a college biology teacher and later sold appliances at Sears, Roebuck while publishing his poetry in journals and collections. Though he had no academic pedigree in English, he managed to get a position teaching it at Louisiana State University in 1962 with a collection of references from writers like Flannery O’Connor, Howard Nemerov, John Ciardi and Richard Yates.

Despite the elite company he kept, Mr. Williams was allergic to pretension and what he once called “coyness” in poetry. In an interview with The Oxford American, he proudly recounted the time the singer Hank Williams Sr. told him over drinks at a gas station in Lake Charles, La., that he had “a beer-drinking soul.”

Mr. Williams’s poems were written in common and accessible language, beginning with his own everyday experience but leading to something a reader could recognize as universal. [...]

Learn more at The New York Times.