Alina Happy Hansen

I recently finished reading, Making a Poem: Some Thoughts About Poetry and the People Who Write It by Miller Williams who was a former inaugural poet for the Clinton administration.

This was an interesting read in that Williams looked at writing poetry from angles I had not previously considered such as The Writer and The Editor, The Scientist and The Humanist, and Translate. These are all chapters that begin in the middle to end of the book and discuss relationships between being a writer and the editor, with personal experience from Williams in both positions. The Scientist and The Humanist is a dialogue between Williams and another on the similarities between scientific thinking and the efforts of humanism and particularly how these are mimetic to writing poetry, or what poetry tries to achieve. And lastly, the subject Translate, which is on translating poetry into English or vice versa. Translation being a critical part of the literary world that can often have detrimental effects on the work itself: a beautiful line can be altered into a wobbly ugly thing if a translation fails.

These particular topics were intriguing to me, since I had some inkling of them but have never really read any serious discussion on them. Reading Williams perceptions and responses on these topics helped me gain more insight and information from a reliable source. Overall, I would recommend this book to those interested in reading about writing Poetry in a loose manner. It is not very rigid, and it is definitely not a “how-to” manual but nevertheless, it provides valuable insight into Poetry.

Thank you for reading my work! I hope you will return in the future! 

-Alina