Liza McAlister Williams - Poet and teacher

Liza McAlister Williams has been going to her family cottage in Bayfield, Ontario since she was a child. When she was 10 or 11, she wrote a poem comparing her attic bedroom to a ship. It was the first poem she ever wrote and a copy of the poem is still on the wall at the cottage today.

Liza is now an English teacher at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Her life-long interest in poetry is due in part to the influence of her father, Robert Williams, a speech teacher at the Juilliard School who writes poems in his free time.

Raising her own children has brought Liza even closer to the world of poetry. She began writing children's poems when her two daughters were small. By the time her younger daughter was four, Liza realized she was writing more and more and she decided to make poetry into a conscious enterprise. Although the children's poems she wrote were rhymed, she made a point not to simplify the poems, which were often complex. Writing children's poems was a decade-long training ground for what she's doing now.

Liza is currently working on form, on sonnets and on modifying received forms. When she writes a new poem, she shares it by email with a small group of friends and family members. She says she's "quite Emily Dickinson-ish," because she hasn't published many of her poems - Emily Dickinson only published one or two poems in her lifetime. Liza's daughters have been encouraging her to send her poems out to publishers, something she finds very difficult to do. However, Liza would love to have more of her poems published and gain a wider audience.

Liza finds that the most difficult aspect of writing poems is grasping onto the ideas that come into her head. She says, "If an idea drifts by, I have to reach out into the ether and grab it. I need to make the time to develop the idea when it comes to me, otherwise I lose it."

When she was young, Liza was influenced by the poetry of John Masefield and Robert Louis Stevenson. Today, she's delighted by the contemporary poets who have continued to write in form despite the 20th-century tendency to use free verse. Some of the poets whom Liza particularly admires are Richard Wilbur, Nikki Giovanni, W. H. Auden, Robert Frost and Marie Ponsot.

Poetry is an integral part of Liza's life. As she says, "It gives me tremendous satisfaction to make something I think is complex and surprising."

Here are three of Liza's poems, Driving through Ontario, Space Travel and The Last Flowers.

Driving through Ontario

For miles and miles the orderly grooves of the harrows
are newly pricked with green in velvet furrows.
Across its tawny contoured hide, the land
is marked by taming: fences, windbreaks band
the concentrated garden smears of poppy,
purple iris, lavish peony.
We pass a roadside house, its Scottish eaves
translated into yellow brick; green leaves
of a stately overarching century maple
shade the gingerbreaded roof with dapple.
And past the gravel laneway edged with pines
dozens of hockey jerseys on the line,
the random numbers pegged precisely, seem
a tribute to the local junior team.

Space Travel

The moon's an uninhabitable place,
her barren dunes and craters never seen
by connoisseurs of landscape; and her face
from this enormous distance greyish-green
and luminous, shines down with little trace
of feeling, impassive - which we deem serene.
The moon that hangs there is a commonplace,
remote, unknowable as an ice queen.

When I first met you, you were like the moon -
an icon, or a symbol, set apart,
but as I traveled close to you, I soon
began to sense the beating of a heart.
Between the power of your lunar tide
and my own gravity, we might collide.

The Last Flowers

Who are the stalwart bloomers now
When the wind is edged with snow?
When the oak turns red and the maples blaze
And the gingko stands in a yellow haze
While its leaves cling fast to their numbered days?
How can the flowers still grow?

These are the ones that are blooming now
In the chill before the snow:
The chrysanthemums with their pungent scent,
The lingering rose on its cane low bent,
And the marigolds in their merriment
Are the only flowers that grow.

How can the blossoms still hold sway
In the face of the promised snow?
When the sun is warm but the air is cold
And the mums glow red and the marigolds gold
And the rose’s velvety folds unfold?
Just the hardiest flowers still grow.