It was twenty-seven years ago—1994—I overheard some cocktail conversation that led me, in a way, to buy a book of poetry recently. I was attending the annual Wesleyan Writers' Conference in Middletown, Connecticut, and we were enjoying a first-day social hour. I stood near someone I recognized. The poet Dana Gioia. In fact I brought my copy of his first book of poems, Daily Horoscopes , with me, hoping for an autograph.
Gioia was having a conversation with a young man, who by his speech, his posture, seemed driven. The young man was Wilmer Mills. I later learned Mills had won the Story Line Press competition to have his first book of poems published. In 1994, Wilmer Mills was all of twenty-four, barely out of college.
The gist of what Gioia told Mills was: If you care for your long-term reputation, Don't publish now, wait until you've written more. The advice made sense, given Gioia published his inaugural Daily Horoscopes when he was thirty-six, not twenty-four years old.
I have in hand proof Mills followed Gioia's advice: Light for the Orphans, a collection of 33 poems, was published by Story Line in its First Books Series in 2002, eight years after Wesleyan. Accomplished poems, they promise a memorable American poet.
The poems have what Gioia calls a New Formalism. One poem I like, "Morning Song," describes a mom preparing breakfast, while the rest of her family has yet to arise. Writing in rhymed pentameter, this excerpt depicts the melody in her work:
My mother's song fades in and out of what
She does. It's clear she stops to concentrate
One spoon of baking powder, flour cut
With shortening, then song again. A plate
Of bacon interrupts, then she returns
To humming. The house becomes her instrument
And we, like sluggish bees, get up in turn,
Charmed out of sleep by her sung disenchantment.
Poet Mills wasn't the one to inherit and work the family farm. He and others, subjects of the poems, are the "orphans" in the book title, dislocated from the past. Like the steeplejack who, after building spires on old churches, was replaced by low bidders that do the job with cranes. It's for these "orphans," the poems illuminate, say "Remember me. Remember me."
Nonetheless, staying true to his roots in the agrarian South, Wilmer Mills liked honest manual labor. When his book was published, Mills' day job was operating a sawmill.
Sadly, Wilmer did not see a second book of poetry published. He died, age forty-one, of untreatable liver cancer. We are left then with poems for which it can be said, he gave a life.
Light for the Orphans: Poems by Wilmer Mills, Story Line Press, Ashland, Oregon. 2002, 94 pp. ISBN: 978-1-586540159
Image credit: kingdompoets.blogspot.com
Read Charlie Dickinson's story collection The Cat at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable formats:
.mobi (Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)
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