A New York native, Jane Miller
currently resides in Tucson, where she is a faculty member of the
Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. She is the
author of eight volumes of poetry, including A Palace of Pearls,
American Odalisque, Black Holes, Black
Stockings, Many Junipers, Heartbeats,
Wherever You Lay Your Head, and Memory at
These Speeds; New and Selected Poems. Her honors include the
National Poetry Series Selection for her book The Greater
Leisures and the Western States Book Award for August
Zero. Additionally, Jane is the recipient of two National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s
Digest Award, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
She has also written Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture,
and Travel (University of Michigan’s Poets on Poetry
Series).
GB: You were a painter originally, so what moved you to poetry?
Is the creative process for both mediums similar and continuous, or
is it a matter of how you’re interested in carrying it out?
Is there a significant difference between the two that drove you to
poetry?
JM: I think it’s the same process, but a different
product, obviously, and while I was painting I was also writing poetry.
And I found it very hard to do both. I know that some artists not
only find it easy, they find it necessary to do more than one at a
time, but while trying to do both and failing to do either well, I
realized I was going to have to choose. And I still miss painting
very much, but I chose the one I thought I was farther along in.
And I’ve often
wondered about it, but I don’t have any regrets about it. I
just have some wonder about it, and I use and have brought forward
many of the reasons why I was attracted to painting into my poems.
For example, I make use of color and design, so the structure of poetry,
that’s related, and it’s a lot like making the underpainting
for a painting. You need a general idea, but you don’t just
start with the color in one corner and walk it across the canvas,
you have a general idea that you do—at least, the way I did
it in my novice way, my amateur way, was to have an underpainting
done in very light oil paint, mostly oil, a sketch, taken by the way
from sketches from paper.
So when I sit down to write
poems, I’m not that far from that process. I already have a
vague idea, I might have a stimulant of an image, or a feeling, and
then of course, the process is the same. Different, and the same.
GB: In thinking about the writing exercise we did in your workshop [in which lines taken from poems throughout the week were strung together to form a final “super poem”], and reading some of your work in Memory at These Speeds, a lot of your work seems to be an accretion of ideas and things. Do you ever write that way, with pieces that you collect and start to pull out?
JM: Yes, that’s how I write. That’s
how I write. Recently, however, I wrote a book-length poem, and that
was a different experience, because once I started, I realized I needed
more structure, and so I limited myself as to what I would include.
I didn’t just have a loose collection of poems based around
a feeling, or a landscape, because I think all books, if they’re
going to be—well, I think it was James Wright who said that
if you have forty-nine poems, the order is the fiftieth poem. And
so all books, even if they are made of discrete elements, have to
have some either linearity, that would be one way of ordering them
in, or perhaps a voice orders it.
You can order it informally,
say, long poems interspersed with short poems for variety, or one
long poem and then a bunch of short poems. I think one of the masters
of this organization of a book is Robert Hass, if you look through
his collections. He’s just absolutely wonderful at keeping the
reader musically, as well as intellectually engaged, and that would
be my goal, to keep the reader engaged. So, with that one exception,
and really, even A Palace of Pearls, the book-length poem, is not
that different from the other collections. I just delimited myself
even more. I tried to stay on subject, even though the subject is
pretty broad.
GB: At a Squaw Valley craft talk last summer, Robert Hass said that part of what poets need to do is to invent the next needful thing. What sort of need is addressed for you in moving into the book-length poem?
JM: Difference. Difference. I am one of the poets who really likes to not write the same book twice. Although I think you can’t quite escape yourself. Nevertheless, if I can I’d like to set myself a great distance in my starting point from where I last ended. Which is why I don’t write my way over to the next book. I take a very long period of quiet.
GB: You mentioned voice earlier, and in Carl [Phillips]’s craft talk yesterday he was talking about authenticity to strangeness, finding the stranger inside and trying to maintain the authenticity to one’s own strangeness, what are your feelings regarding this?
JM: Well, I thought Carl’s talk was beautiful,
because he really got to the center of the issue of writing, I thought,
when he used the word risk. You really risk—that’s what
you’re risking, you’re risking strangeness, but if you
take that lightly, you could just be odd or quirky. I think he was
talking about getting to the part of yourself that is both very familiar
and very mysterious at the same time, that’s what’s so
strange. It’s all close to your soul, but there’s peril
there. And so you’re both urged on by the mystery and terrified
to go further into the mystery.
If I heard him correctly
speak of risk, he was also speaking of matters of the soul. And I’m
trying roughly to paraphrase him. So I do think that strangeness is
something to follow, but not as a surface idea, not simply to be an
oddball. So it becomes a matter of getting to that place in yourself
where the rhythms of your thinking, the rhythms of your bodily experience
in the world, are reflected on the page. You know, you don’t
just arbitrarily say, well, I think I’m going to use every other
word with three n’s in it, I’ll set up that game. Now,
I know that there are writers who do play word games, and I think
it’s marvelous, especially as they go deeper into the game.
But just to come up with an arbitrary game on Tuesday to keep yourself
busy, and never explore arbitrariness itself, further than that Tuesday,
I think is just lazy.
GB: Some of the poems we’ve read this week, the Milosz poems, and some of your poems, have reminded us of the discussions the fiction writers have been having about whether a story should have an agenda, and what writing needs to do, if it has an obligation to do anything in particular. For instance, Milosz asks, what does poetry do that doesn’t save nations or people?, do you feel that there is an agenda vital to the function of poetry, for your own poetry, that you try to work through?
JM: By the way, I think that he recanted that or
changed it years later. Not that he doesn’t think poetry has
power, he just spoke somewhat differently about it years later. I
won’t—I’m not at liberty to paraphrase Mr. Milosz,
but I will say for myself over here that I think poetry has a powerful
subterranean effect on the culture, and it also has an obligation
to realize that. It can’t pretend that it’s an effete
act. I think that would be adolescent and irresponsible.
On the other hand, poetry
has to be very careful because if it starts to preach, it loses its
audience, and if it’s too direct it loses its audience. And
that line, where the audience is engaged, is a moving target. It’s
not static, it’s not something you figure out in one poem—How
can I get people engaged? Well, I’ll talk about blood on the
floor, that’s always, that word blood with it’s big bold
b and lots of o’s and then stopping on a dime with that d, that
will interest people. It’s not, that’s not that simple.
That’s sort of pyrotechnics, I think, and that, you know, it’s
just like a big noise going off, it will get people’s attention,
but immediately they will be resentful because they’ve been
used. So this area in which the reader and the writer meet is a wonderful,
amorphous, malleable place, and if you can get there with some combination
of magic and music and intellect, and that’s just the getting
there, but if you can get to that place, then there are responsibilities
there. And those too are fragile, and those too are difficult, and
everybody has a different relationship to that place.
My own relationship is
tenuous at best, sometimes I don’t know—I know I’m
responsible, I feel that way all the time. I shake with it. But I
don’t know what I’m responsible for, and I don’t
know all the time who I’m responsible to. So I have to find
it out every time I start to write. Okay, I know how—I know
what I want to do today. I think I’d like to write a poem. Well,
that’s not going to work. It’s a much more organic and
difficult task. I have to feel taken over by something, and then I
have to meet it halfway. And then, the hard work starts. That’s
just the inspiration.
GB: Do you have a writing routine, or do you write only when compelled by something in particular?
JM: No routine. No routine, no habit. I like to
feel free. And I sometimes think, well, I’ve been lazy, I could
have written more, I could have thought more deeply, I should have
studied more. But that is—it never changes, the process. That’s
just guilt, that’s remorse, that’s pity. None of that,
you know, those are all the minor emotions that truly don’t
change me and my habits. So, large things do change my habits. For
example, writing very quickly one summer to write a one-book poem.
That’s something I never did, and I didn’t look lazy during
that period, you know, because I was writing every day, fifteen and
sixteen hours a day, until I couldn’t see straight. And I got
too lonely, I was very happy when the process was over, although I
couldn’t really control when it was going to be over, I was
just relieved, I think, at the end.
So, in some deep place
in me I do work toward changing my process, but it’s completely
unconscious. I feel that I want to do something different, it’s
a deep, powerful, unthoughtful feeling in me, and then I just start
to wait, and I trust that something will happen. I’m not really
interested in the quantity of what I write but in the quality of it,
and for me that means not writing too much.
Some people write a whole book between books, then they kind of throw
it out because it sounds too similar—I admire those people,
I wish I could do that, but I’m simply not made to do that.
GB: Does this desire to change your writing process shape your teaching style?
JM: I urge my students to get to know their own
processes and to adapt to new processes when they notice them. The
hardest thing to do as a teacher is to stay out of other people’s
faces. I have a thing that I call Kill the Buddha. By the end of a
semester, if it’s a semester that you’re working with
people, the teacher should disappear. The teacher’s a very powerful
force for a while when people are very lost. The teacher can make
suggestions. I feel bibliographic, I can give lots of suggestions
for reading once I sort of sense what might be interesting to the
group. And that’s kind of hit and miss, because you have to
make your own canon, you know. And then I just, I try to remove myself
more and more from the discussion so that I’m a presence.
I try to put out myself
when I’m in the room, so that people can feel that they’re
in the company of a fellow artist. I think that’s very possible
to do without pontificating about Keats. Although I’d like to
think that occasionally I have something to say about Keats, but I
try to keep it to a minimum, because I’m not interested in learning
my views. It’s true that in an interview somebody might say
well, what do you think of Keats, and I would try to respond, but
an interview and a classroom are not the same setting, and I don’t
think a teacher should treat a classroom like it’s an interview,
and that the students are trying to get my personal, you know, my
private Idaho down so that they can make it their own. And I believe
Carl said this more eloquently yesterday when he was speaking about
the role of the teacher.
GB: You mentioned that when you were writing the book-length poem it was a lonely process, and some of your work has been collaborative, the poems [in Black Holes, Black Stockings] with Olga Broumas. There’s such a focus on the poet as a solitary figure and poetry as an isolating activity, often, in the way that we think about it. Can you talk about poetry as collaborative and how your experience as an artist changes when you work with someone?
JM: Well, I was opposed to working with someone,
I had to be dragged by my hair into the process, because I simply
thought that the artist’s experience was sacrosanct and private,
and even though it was lonely, it was a good loneliness, and I protected
it ardently. And Olga simply said, why don’t you try it? What
have you got to lose, you can always stop. So, off we went, and we
made a few rules. We decided that we would not look back after the
day on which we wrote, and we would write some pieces together, but
mostly apart, and correct each other’s pieces, so to speak.
You know, if what she wrote had a wonderful ending, I would tack it
on to mine. We were pretty loose, because we had what we thought was
a strong force guiding us, which was the Mediterranean region that
we were traveling in. We felt that landscape and nature, geography,
would provide a ground or ballast, and we could play off of that.
And of course there were characters, there were lives, so we had enough,
and we just kept going forward. And I kept screaming, but there’s
no story, there’s no story, I don’t get any of this! And
she would say keep going, keep going, there’s a story, there’s
a story.
So, we were two different
forces, and I think that’s important for collaboration. I recommend
that you don’t work with someone who writes a whole heck of
a lot like you do. Although that would be hard to find, wouldn’t
it? But you don’t want the person bringing out in you, I don’t
think, the same thing that you’re used to bringing out on your
own. You would like to be surprised by what comes out of you, let
alone what comes out of the other person. That’s always wonderfully
surprising, but you’ve got to let somebody in deep enough to
be able to say about the line you think is your best line on a given
day, but it’s awful. Let it go. So there’s an immediate
editorial trust. There’s a bond. It’s much different from
a classroom because you can say well, I never liked her anyway, why
should I listen to her, or he’s a fool. But you’re collaborators
with someone you love and admire, presumably, or you wouldn’t
be working over time with that person, unless you were forced, and
then that would be a different set of events. So because I trusted
her and loved her, I just went on with it, and then later, when enough
time had passed, we did look back. We waited a year and then very
swiftly, because we were separated by a great distance, very swiftly
on the telephone we revised it, in a thirteen-hour phone call. Very
expensive, I might add. This was before you had free minutes.
GB: So do you often work with a writing partner even now?
JM: I’ve never done it again.
GB: Would you?
JM: It would take the right person to ask me, and the right circumstances. Time and space. We were traveling together, we were without constraint, and that was a very important part of it for me. So, I barely now have enough time to do my own work. I think it would be very difficult to work with somebody else. But I don’t rule it out, because I learned so much in doing it.
GB: It’s an interesting thing. It seems like poets are very protective. Even in workshop, you feel that way a lot, like you’re glad to be getting the help of other people, but there’s a big part of you that doesn’t want anyone’s hands on your work.
JM: That’s right. That’s right. Well, what was most liberating for me was that in the end this attachment to my material disappeared, because she claims to have written pieces that I know I wrote. And I’m certain of things that are hers that she claims that I wrote. I mean, to this day. So it’s all gone, isn’t it? It’s all, all of the generating force is gone, and what remains is the product.
GB: Does it bother you that your names are there together at the front but nobody knows which is which in the poems?
JM: Well, the fool in me thinks that I know, but of course, when I get quiet I realize that it doesn’t matter. And then, of course, when it’s criticized I can say, oh, I had nothing to do with that.
GB: We’ve read your work described as having a sort of misplaced reverence. At the reading last night, Joe Wenderoth talked about poems that are viewed as irreverent as being really a different kind of reverence, and I wonder if you think of your poetry in those terms, if you’re interested in that kind of idea?
JM: Well, as he pointed out, I mean, technically
speaking, all poetry that is not sacred, that is not dealing with
sacred themes, is considered irreverent on some level. And then you
have all sorts of layers down to the perverse, and I think I’m
somewhere near the bottom. I’m one of the bottom-dwellers. Not
that I feel that I’m blaspheming that which I want to participate
in, that is to say the development of consciousness and the human
soul, I’m very reverent toward that, but I don’t know
if that’s recognized, as Joe would say, as part of the official
reverent category.
So, yeah, I’m probably
irreverent. For example, I use high and low diction, and that drop
into colloquial speech might signal to some readers that this is going
to be other than amorous towards the spiritual realm. And my forays
into amorous activity are pretty obscene to some people.
Being homosexual, that’s the first line of defense that crumbles,
and there’s—let’s see, what else have I got going
on. I don’t know, just being a woman, that’s a problem
for some people. And on and on. I mean, all the things in which—you
know, as Adrienne Rich put it, the margin is a difficult place to
be, and it’s a place of irreverence because you’re looking
off into the abyss. But I would rather be there than anywhere. And
I loved listening to Joe making that differentiation, that there really
is a reverence about the irreverent. I thought that that was very
succinct and beautiful. But aren’t all artists subversive in
some way? So we’re all dirty rotten scoundrels, not just Steve
Martin.
GB: There’s a line in one of your poems that differentiates doing something arty that the public likes and the making of “delicious wrong language.” Is that a kind of definition of poetry for you, and what poetry does?
JM: Well, I’m not in a position to define poetry, especially on such a beautiful day, but poetry probably has something to do with emotion that really can’t be expressed. We are always trying to close the gap between what we find moving and how to possibly express this. And it’s always the wrong language, it’s never quite the right language. we have hope that someday we might get a few words right, but mostly it’s—we’re being arty or we’re being clever or we’re trying to be original or we’re trying to be deep, and just miss. However, it’s noble to try, and I feel very fortunate to sometimes be moved to write poetry. It is not something that I think I’ve ever really gotten right, but I love the danger there.
GB: Joshua Clover spoke about how the world changes and artists notice it, and art changes because of the world and events in people’s lives, and their relationships to each other and the world. There’s so much that feels like it’s changing in the present moment. Do you feel like you know where art needs to go right now?
JM: Well, everybody would like to know the next
poetry. Really I don’t think it’s a seeing into the future
that one needs to answer your question, so much as being completely
in the present. So really it’s not a matter of being prophetic;
nevertheless, it’s still very hard.
Most of us are looking
backwards, trying to understand what we’ve just been through
or what we’ve been through long ago, trying to make something
of memory. But I suppose the flip side of memory is desire, at least
I think so, and I believe that the next poetry is going to have to
speak to the next desire, and if I can be presumptuous for a moment,
if what we desire is not the health of the planet, then we’re
really not going to be around to see art or life continue. So it’s
become rather dire. And living in an imperialist country, one becomes
doubly responsible for the needs of others. And yet, if one is involved
in the creative arts, in language in my case, what to do? What to
do? You can’t exactly go out and build housing with your list
of words that you’ve accumulated in your journal.
So there’s a real,
there’s a dilemma, and I think that one has to begin in one’s
own life and then, certainly, take it from there. So I often ask myself,
what are my moral obligations, and how can I fulfill them? And one
of the ways that I can think of fulfilling them is to try to be a
really good teacher. I haven’t figured out what else I can do.
I know I can volunteer at a hospital, and I haven’t done it,
and I have a lot of guilt about that. However, I don’t think
that an artist who honors his work is being disrespectful to the planet.
It’s just an indirect route.
And I have to remind myself
that art has value. I do believe art has value. And I do believe that
changing people’s lives through art is entirely, entirely possible.
I remember reading about Lorca, who was also, aside from being a poet,
a playwright, among other things, and he felt that you could, with
a really amazing play, especially if, as he did, you take it around
to theaters, and not just have it in one centralized location, say
in New York city, but if you actually bring it on the road, and some
numbers see it, or if you’re lucky and you get it, say, televised,
that a really good play can change the culture in a couple of years.
Now, poetry is in some
respects less accessible than a traveling play, but there are huge
numbers of people reading and writing poetry today in all kinds of
venues, in all kinds of styles, from adolescents to people who are
older. And they’re not being forced to. So that power seems
very, very honest.
GB: We see a lot of Lorca in your work, and other influences you’ve talked about. Could you talk about influences as you were beginning your craft, and the evolution of these influences?
JM: Well, they’re still with me. I really
haven’t dropped the ones I started with, I go back and back
to them. I think I have a deep reading, but I don’t have a terribly
wide reading of literature. I was drawn to a lot of women writers,
because I felt that they were largely ignored when I was being educated,
and that was something that I had to seek out on my own, so it became
special.
Virginia Woolf was a tremendous influence on me, Gertrude Stein, and,
of course, more recently, among the living, Adrienne Rich. These are
giants who made me think about not so much my work, but myself. Who
did I want to be? I mean, remember, every time you start out on a
piece, you’re not really thinking what do I want to make. You’re
thinking who am I now, and what does that mean, and what can come
from it? I don’t think you know about the product until much
later. But you can sense that you’re frenetic inside, and you
have options as a human being. If you’re an artist, one of those
options is to transform that power into language. But that’s
a lot, to get close to something profound. Not that one is experiencing,
but that one senses in the world. To connect with the world, to connect
one’s deepest self with what’s going on in the world,
and to have ideas about that, and to try to make that musical. That
seems to be a huge task. And those women that I’m talking about
were enormous people before they were enormous artists. They had to
be. It’s not like they wrote great art and became extraordinary
women, they were extraordinary women who were moved to make great
art.
Now, their art, perhaps—it
was more hand in hand than I’m saying, it’s not like they
were born complete, but there was something. There’s something
to this day very inspiring about their fortitude. That they just kept
on going as artists. Also thinking about Marguerite Duras, a beautiful
French writer. I suppose I’m drawn to people I’m drawn
to for their lyricisim. Because I consider myself a love poet, and
I consider them lyric poets, so even though certainly there are men,
plenty of men who use lyricism, I just felt directly connected to
those women’s experiences, and their voices seemed like a harbor
to me. And I still go back to it. And by harbor I mean that quite
seriously, because I live in a desert now, so the whole notion of
a harbor is profound for me.
GB: As a closing question, and a teaching question, too, if there were just a few things that you could say to beginning writers, or if there are a few things you were told that made a big difference for you as a poet starting out, what would those be?
JM: Well, I think one of the most important things
to remember is to trust your intuition, as you would in life. Trust
your intuition about people who you want to open up to. That’s
something that comes slowly, but when it arrives you know it, you
know you’ve made a good friend, you know you’re in love,
you know you love this pet even though it’s just pooped all
over your living room, you love this pet. And so I would urge all
writers—all writers are new all the time, and there’s
a new project, but particularly writers who are working on a first
book—to trust the process.
There’s lots of advice
out there, it’s burgeoning with expansion, and in a way you
have to keep all that at bay. You’re fortunate in one regard
in that you have proximity to instruction, but the danger there is
to follow somebody else’s course and somebody else’s advice.
Yet here I am, in fact, giving advice. At least my advice is to be
careful of the advice, and to follow your own intuition in art as
you do in life. It’s as natural a process as getting a new friend
and feeling fantastic after you have dinner. You’re walking
home at the end of an evening and you realize yeah, this is just fabulous,
what a wonderful person, how lucky am I. Well, art’s just like
that. That poem has its own identity that you’re writing, and
you’re working on. How fabulous that this poem’s now on
your page, and, you know, you kind of have to trust it and give it
a lot of room. You know, give it variable endings, give it time. Wait
till you’re ready to see it again, just as you would a friend.
I mean, if you fall in love, you’re not going to immediately
say, I need to see you in five minutes. That’s dangerous, that’s
a mistake. Time has to pass. How much time? I don’t know. That’s
a matter of intuition.