Jane Miller (5) (1949–)

In "Thunderbird," Jane Miller writes a series of poems linked by last line and title and a kind of stream of consciousness rendering of what seem to be stories she has been told as well as her own experiences. She often juxtaposes seemingly unrelated images and tries to rehabilitate stake expressions by their introduction into these juxtapositions. Overall, the book is a modest success; but sometimes the effort is strained. For this reader at least, the emotion did not always feel real or earned by the getting to it.… (mehr)

Miller’s poetry here strikes me as cumulative as well as accumulative. Significance accrues as one reads through the collection. In this sense, her poems function somewhat like the prose in a novel of ideas, both self-reflective and outward-looking. A Palace of Pearls is comprised of thirty-four numbered poems plus a coda, that is, the numerals 1-34 function as titles. The last line of each of the numbered poems is written in capital letters. These lines in turn form, in numerical order, the lines of the final poem entitled “Coda,” a formal choice that highlights the inseparability of one poem from another.
Miller's writing is elegant, but does not grasp at the gorgeous in language; this is poetry to be felt and thought with one's eyes wide open, not poetry that makes one swoon. All to the better, since this is no romanticized retreat into what Yves Bonnefoy (writing about the French romantics) called the “pretentiousness of the me,” even though Miller doesn’t hesitate to make use of the raw material of her personal life. This is not Language poetry either, even though it is intimately about the using and uses of language and the very notion and nature of use: what is the use of poetry? what does poetry do or accomplish?, how does (or should) a poet engage notions of culpability and responsibility vis-à-vis her world, her situation? In "21" she says, “people are cut they’re frightened/ they want to know why they want to know/ where they are dying well aware/ it is not in this poem”. There is an element of reportage in A Palace of Pearls, the eye of the journalist (from the root meaning daily) issuing field reports on art, architecture, history, love, and war. Numerous themes or “subjects” weave in and out, among which are the painters Goya and Caravaggio (shadows), Andalusia, the Alhambra, the poet Lorca (it is a household employee of his family who enacts for him and his brother the tale of the Palace of Pearls), the Inquisition (and by extension, the Holocaust), the poet’s dying/ dead father, the poet’s girlfriend on a trip to Italy, Naples (Caravaggio was stranded in Naples), Pompeii and Rome, the Arizona desert, and a honeymoon in Hawaii. Even though Miller claims in "22" that “history is the last thing poems should tell/ and stories next to last so poetry is all/ a scent of berry like a splash of destiny/ which hints at the best of life and after its small/ thrill passes like a small lost civilization/ it can be solace and sadness as well . . . . the poem restores nothing,” I think that A Palace of Pearls, its art, landscapes and travel memoirs included, admirably succeeds in bearing witness.… (mehr)

I first read August Zero for a course in Postmodern Poetry at Sonoma State University back in 1996. I append the "reader's response essay" I wrote at the time:
“There was this seduction/ by the shells, the stones, the wind, aided by our thirst.” (Blanks For New Things) Jane Miller immerses us in a material world, where the actual substance of things carries a charge. She creates a distinct and dazzling imagery, with little use of metaphor. In Any Two Wheels, she goes even further and actively deconstructs figures of speech, “that pair in the tunnel of love/-and it is a tunnel, and it is love.” She returns the words to their referents and reverses the process of abstraction, wherein “we are/ being made into words even as we speak.” (Poetry) She pierces the mediated experience of late 20th century American culture with the tangible weight of flesh and blood and wood and stone.
Miller successfully calls forth the presence of things in her poetry. She lists and she names; branch, bridge, wood, ramp, ballpark, airport, headlamps, mall, cement, etc. (The Poet) This naming becomes both a chant (an invocation) and a conversation. The interchange initiated takes place both off and on the page, as Miller also chooses a conversational tone when performing her work. She seeks to thus ease her listeners and readers into the more difficult aspects of her poetry (e.g., the many leaps of association and juxtaposition). Hers too are the manners of seduction, refined with music and color, yet based in a language so actual that it is like “the bare earth, packed hard and nailed/ to the tune of the unconscious.” (August Zero)
In Flames Light Up The Rough Walls and Earnest Faces, Miller lays out her mother’s tablecloth for us and reveals our human fate, unequivocally linked to the fate of the material world. Each of us has a stake in the folding and unfolding of the cloth, our hands smoothing the creases, “touching language directly.”(Any Two Wheels) If words can become acts with which we “fiercely participate in a disappearing place” (The Poet) then suggestive words may also be our last defense against the “indifferent men with indifferent plans” (Flames...) who have built the condos wherein beauty can only endure as a treasure passed from mother to daughter. Miller recognizes this subversive potential in language and the poet’s inclination and task, which is to do “the serviceable and natural thing,/ the illegal thing of keeping the language alive.” (Turning Over The Earth)
“We name the world with a word in mind,/ and then locate the thing in the leaves.” (Into a Space My Time Has Gone) The language comes back to life when the process of abstraction is reversed, when ideas are returned to matter. In Sequel, Miller turns our reality around when she says, “Let the illusion of time be a woman racing in heels on smooth stones for a train.” Language is both act and abstraction, however. Thus its alignment with the material world will necessarily be approximate. The word is ultimately not the thing, but evocative language can bring us into the presence of the real. Miller acknowledges that “we can’t touch exactly/ but attempt a profound correlation.” (August Zero) The truth of lovers is also the truth of language.
In her poetry, Miller takes on a certain responsibility, that of speaking “with the least important/ least visited, raped, riddled/ speech in nature.” (The Enchanted Forest) and, in so doing, avoiding the “false immortality of imagery.” (Screening) Hers is an ethics of reclamation, of shoring up, of finding both the words and the acts that will give “every mountain...back pinecones” (Beauty) and that will once again “help us/ spend the night.” (Cast From Heaven) This is fit and arduous work for lovers; lovers of language, lovers of men and women, lovers of this “curve in space.” Jane Miller is doing this work well, seducing us, exchanging with us “the material body of our message/ the joy in true contact/ with things, merciful things.” (The Enchanted Forest)




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Although essentially prose (if what is meant by essence is form)Midnights can just as well (as in, I am doing very well, thank you) be called poetry. If for no other reason than that Miller is best known as a poet. Midnights was published by Saturnalia as number 4 in a series of collaborations between artists and writers. Miller's prose/poetry has been fortuitously paired here with the black and white oil stick drawings of Beverly Pepper. With their hatch-lines and massed shapes, the drawings, while not illustrative, serve well to reinforce/ re-express the emotional intensity (grief, anxiety, pain)of Miller's words.
I bought this book at the University of Arizona bookstore (where Miller is a Prof of English) while on vacation in Tucson and in complement to her A Palace of Pearls, which I purchased in the same bookstore on almost the same vacation a year ago. Such personal details (references) are entirely in keeping with the book itself, which is a weave or relationship of such details: the senile debility of a mother, the shattering breakup of lover and beloved (how one fights for love and mourns for love by tooth and claw, by dream and drug and discipline). Everyone is named in Midnights. No one remains anonymous. Or so we are told. There are the suicides, the precursors, Celan and Woolf. And the famous and the unfamous dead: the girls thrown out of the bed of a pickup; Anne Frank in Amsterdam, 1944; the lover's murdered first love, the "husband"-friend's father's blowing his brains out, etc. But there is much more: art, music, food, too much drink, beaches, hotel rooms and private residences in many locales (Berkeley, Tucson, Amsterdam, Italy, China . . .). There are so many friends.
Miller's self-absorption inlove and loss, however, wears me out.… (mehr)