Miller Williams to the rescue

A Note to the Alien on Earth

by Miller Williams

 

Here, in the interest of time, some words to work with,

assuming you’re pretending to be a man

or woman and understand English. If this should find you,

know that I’m glad to help any way I can.

 

A letter beginning “Dear Friend” is not from a friend.

A “free gift” is redundant and not free.

A teenager is sex with skin around it.

The one word used as much as “I” is “me.”

 

People who are politically correct,

which means never offending by what they say,

will lie about other things, too. Be careful with them.

And people insulting groups of people may

 

look in the mirror too much or not enough.

What you say is not what anyone hears.

Be wary of one who is always or never sad.

And try to be patient with us. It looks bad,

but we’ve only had a few hundred thousand years.

 

 

 

If the overload of cruelty and carnage in the world makes you want to hide in a shed with a year’s worth of canned goods and rom-coms, Miller Williams is here to coax you out. With his gentle humor and folksy wisdom, Williams tells us that yeah, we’ve got trouble, but nothing that a little patience and understanding can’t make right.

 

For sure this isn’t poetry to set the world on fire, and for sure his ribbing doesn’t address the very worst of modern American problems. He limits his catalogue of our ills to the culture of marketing and politics of division–but just relax for a moment and enjoy. As mothers of teenagers love to tell mothers of toddlers, little problems can be a relief sometimes from much worse ones.

 

Here, in the interests of time, begins his Spark notes on the human race. Because the poem begins and ends with a mention of time, I posted the poem near a clock tower in a northern Michigan resort town.

 

I love this explanation of one of our most salient traits:

 

people insulting groups of people may

look in the mirror too much or not enough.

 

And all of us who enjoy standing on the soapbox now and then should heed this line:

 

What you say is not what anyone hears.

 

Miller Williams is turning into a regular feature here on Poem Elf. (Link here and here for past posts.) I love his lack of pretension, his sweetness, his habit of looking things square in the eye and speaking plainly. He’s a modern day Will Rogers. Others have described him as “the Hank Williams of American poetry. While his poetry is taught at Princeton and Harvard, it’s read and understood by squirrel hunters and taxi drivers.” (Quote from the Poetry Foundation’s biography of Williams.)

 

(The other thing I love about Miller Williams is that he’s the father of singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams. Her sublime “Are You Alright” has been playing in my head since I dropped my youngest off at college a few weeks ago. If you’ve got five minutes to spare, listen here.)

 

I’ve already written a bio of Williams in an earlier post, so I’ll just copy and paste:

 

Miller Williams was born in Hoxie, Arkansas in 1930.  His father was a Methodist minister, and the family often moved around small towns in Arkansas.  Although he loved poetry and enrolled in college to study it, he was told he had shown no verbal aptitude in his entrance exam and was urged to study science.  He got his bachelor’s degree in biology and his masters in zoology.  Later he taught biology at a small college in Georgia, where he met and befriended Flannery O’Connor who lived nearby.  There’s a great story about how O’Connor wrote to the English department at Louisiana State University and told them that the poet they wanted to hire at present was teaching biology at Wesleyan College. Williams sent them some of his work and got the job. He taught at various universities in his long career, eventually coming back to teach at the University of Arkansas.

Williams is father to the great singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, and was mentor to her ex-boyfriend and poet Frank Stanford.  Williams gave the inaugural poem at fellow-Arkansian Bill Clinton’s 1997 inauguration, which you can watch here.