Miller Williams Quotes

I manage a toast to the Christmas tree
and one to the sweet absurdity
in the miracle of the verb to be.
Lucky you, lucky me.

A thing may fail as a poem because it tries to do what a poem cannot do: it tries to become a treatise on cosmic truth ... We can best be exact about the cosmic things - God and truth, beauty, eternity and love - by not talking directly about them.

Every word you add dilutes the sentence.

I always have pen and paper with me.

Jazz is very important. It's not something I can put my finger on. When I'm writing at my favorite time, I like to have the gentle side of Coltrane or Brubeck on the CD player. It creates sort of a spiritual space in which I write best.

I respond to mood. I hear some phrase, or pick up a rhythm.

I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual.

I put myself in a spiritual and physical place where I've learned from experience the synapses are likely to fire and the juices are likely to flow, and simply begin to write.

Wherever it left us,
we were barely learning to live with it
when here came Flannery O'Connor and Hank Williams
to tell us that no one has ever been loved
the way everybody wants to be loved,
and that's hard. That's hard.
last stanza of How Step by Step We Have Come to Understand

I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talking to each other. I try to do both at once.

He lives all alone now, in the home they bought,
and finally seems to be managing, more or less.
Not the way he was, of course, with her,
who lives alone now, too, at the same address.

- Separatio in Loco