Interview with Jane Miller
by Grace Wilentz

Jane Miller graciously met with me at the Marlowe Hotel in Cambridge earlier this month (May 4th 2005). Speaking with Jane Miller was a lot like reading her poems; she is a person of tremendous candor and sincerity. In her newest collection of poems, A Palace of Pearls, Miller’s unmistakable voice explores love, death, war, and one’s place in the world. As her poems move through history and geography, revivifying lives, myths, and cultures, Miller shows us that we can have access to anything through love.

Jane Miller is the author of eight books of poetry: A Palace of Pearl, Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected Poems, August Zero (winner of the Western States Book Award), American Odalisque, Black Holes, Black Stockings (with Olga Broumas), The Greater Leisures, Many Junipers, Heartbeats and a book of essays entitled Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture and Travel. She has received a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, a John Simmons Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. She currently lives in Tucson and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Arizona.

HA: In you new book, A Palace of Pearls, you say that you once thought of becoming a painter. Have you ever considered using your own work for the cover of one of your books?

JM: Only once have I thought it. I just finished a memoir about my time living with Olga [Broumas] and traveling around the Mediterranean region where she was born. I do have one painting that seems frivolous and right, that I would use; I’d like to do that. That’s one vision I have- that I could use something from that time.

HA: Your seventh book of poems, Wherever You Lay Your Head, is strongly influenced by the prints of Japanese artist, Ando Hiroshige. How did you encounter Hiroshige’s work and how was your poetry in dialogue with these prints?

JM: David Hockney, a British painter who lived in America for many years, introduced me to the Chinese scroll, which unwinds and tells a story as it unwinds. You see someone dressing in the morning and going to work and then the person goes to work and sells hats and you watch the hats disappear and then the person goes home- the whole scroll is the narrative. Not being a narrative poet I was really taken with the joy with which these scrolls seemed to tell a story. I always associated narration with a sort of boring sequence of events; I was more interested in what the daydream was when somebody was walking to work rather than where they were going to work. But these scrolls interested me because of their joyousness. When I got into Japanese prints and woodcuts, they seemed to have a similar joy. The master of them all, I believe, is Ando Hiroshige. Though he’s quite interested in nature, he often foregrounds people. They can be in dire circumstances- trying to cross a bridge during a hurricane, or being robbed in the dark of night, but there’s something so alive and powerful in these scenes that I felt I wanted to try to recreate some of the lives of that era. The prints just seemed to capture a moment in time when- how do I say this- when people seemed free; they could take to the road. And Hiroshige could capture that, the whole spectrum- people eating over an open fire, charged moments, tender or frightening. His work got me into little snippets of narrative and of course, I couldn’t go very far thinking about Japan without realizing that the bucolic world presented in some of the prints was not without it’s troubles. I couldn’t ignore the American bombs, the flexing of industrial prowess, so it all got mixed up together, the bucolic and difficult nineteenth century and the developed world of the twentieth century, in the ways that it is vile and the ways that it is beautiful. But the book isn’t just an exploration of one thing- it’s about Japan, it’s about America, it’s about the nineteenth century, it’s about the twentieth century, so it’s fulsome in that regard.

HA: You’ve written in the desert and on the east coast. In many ways, you’re a poet of geographies. How does the place in which you write influence your poetry? Does sensitivity to your surroundings change what you write?

JM: I think it changes the music of one’s writing. You walk to the place differently, you experience the landscape perhaps as a big sky or as a corner of the sky. The location changes your breathing, your thinking. I feel like my line moves around depending on where I am. Even the season alters a person. You can be in the same place during a different season and suddenly the body experiences weather differently. I hate to make an easy correspondence between what’s going on outside and what’s going on inside, it’s not quite that simple, but sometimes I imagine that poetry’s earliest forms and rhythms came from the clip-clop of the horse, the beat of the heart, the experienced movement through a landscape before cars and planes and trains. In more subtle ways, within free verse, I think everyone is influenced by the flow of traffic and the swiftness of the clouds, the lack of a wind, or a sudden storm. Does a sudden storm mean that if you’re writing in your back yard, you’re going to have a monosyllabic word followed by an exclamation point? Not exactly, but the spirit of the world gets inside you and is reflected.

HA: How has living in Tucson, Arizona influenced your writing? Do you consider yourself a desert person?

JM: The vistas of the desert have influenced my writing. I’m not so much out in the desert as looking at it, although I hike. I’m not really what you would call a “nature person”. I don’t think of myself as a nature poet or particularly environmentalist. However, I have become enlightened about what’s going on in the South West. There’s a lot of nuclear experimentation in the South West. You’ll find nuclear waste deposits sites throughout, especially in parts of New Mexico. I drove all around the South West looking at the landscape and suddenly realized that the ground was ticking underneath. That really politicized me quickly, even though I am certainly not a spokes person for an anti-nuclear movement. I, myself, became transfixed by the outside world and gradually left my poor soul behind in gazing to take a more critical look at the landscape and not just focus on its beauty. I wrote a lot of poems and did some thinking about the destruction of the South West with experiments in nuclear fission and uranium dump sites. I would drive to the end of some gorgeous vista and think- ah, my soul will open us here, and realize it’s a military zone and there’s something very strange going on, you can just feel it. I became obsessed with the duality of the beauty and destruction of that part of the country. It’s probably true everywhere in the modern world, I just happen to have experienced it more closely in the four corners area.

HA: A Palace of Pearls certainly has a political bent. This is a hard time for creative people. What do you think the role of the artist is in a time like the present, in a time of war? What can artists do? Do you think artists have an obligation to address political issues?

JM: I’m with Bertold Brecht on this one, “Will there be singing in the dark times? Yes there will be singing about the dark times.” I believe that one can only go on addressing the deepest moral place inside oneself. When I say addressing, I mean really having a conversation with oneself about what one can do on a daily basis. One cannot do much, but little bits of not much add up to a whole lot of energy in terms of the number of artists working in the culture today. I cannot help but think that power is real and earnest. Call me Pollyanna, but I actually believe that without artists there would be no life. Art is a kind of rejuvenation of the spirit and that spirit can become resilient in the face of tremendous adversity. I don’t just mean that art creates pleasure, though certainly there’s nothing like a beautiful ceramic vase or violin concerto- there’s nothing like that in the universe- perhaps not even love which is so filled with the sore spots and wounds in the self. In comparison, art seems quite pure. I have to believe in the power of creation, not just in poetry, but all art forms. The artist must doggedly go forward, making something whenever she can.

HA: How did you come to write poetry? Is it something you’ve always done? Are there teachers you’ve had who’ve been great influences on your writing or your life?

JM: I’ve had wonderful friends who’ve kept me alive, so they have been teachers to me in their own way. I’ve had wonderful teachers as well. I read very widely and I think that’s how I started writing, by being a reader of poetry. I just felt like poetry was a gigantic window into reality. I was instinctively drawn to lyric poetry and love poetry. The more I read the more I wanted to practice. I tried to steep myself in the masters. For me it was a beautiful experience. I never saw it as work. I wrote when I felt moved to do it. I consider myself, still, a poet who writes love poems, but my stance towards the world is in an open posture of love, and that is difficult and can become painful- but I don’t have any alternative positions.

HA: Love and death are very present in A Palace of Pearls. You’ve said that the death of your father was on your mind while writing this collection of poems. Are these love poems? Are they elegies? Are all your poems, in a way, love poems?

JM: Yes, they’re all love poems. The book was written while talking to my dad, Walter Miller whose presence always seems very immediate to me. We were very close in life and that hasn’t changed. I started thinking about being alone on earth and my new book is a sort of meditation on life and death and the role of the poet in the world. Because I was living alone that summer for the first time in a while, a lot of things came flooding in, my father being the first thing that came flooding in. The poems in A Palace of Pearls are published in the order in which they were written. He was the first thing I got to thinking about and the first person I talked to. From then I started to write about daily, earthy subjects.

HA: Your relationship with Olga Broumas undoubtedly introduced you to new poets. Can you speak about how your work changed after encountering the Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos.

JM: He’s a beautiful poet who has certainly had an influence on me- the poet Constantine Cavafy as well. Cavafy was a homosexual poet who wrote very passionate, erotic poems of longing often using characters from Greek history. Though his poetry is set in an ancient, distant past, it is quite modern in its settings, taverns and cafes, and universal in its intimacy. I love that juxtaposition. I think juxtaposition is really important, I love a poetry that is say…intimate and formal or tragic and a farce; I like the mix.
Certainly Ritsos is a beautiful poet; the work of Odysseus Elytis has also meant a lot to me. He’s my favorite. He’s not an easy poet. He was part of the surrealist movement in Europe, but beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. He was the originator of the idea to put all the final lines of one’s poems in capital letters. I use this in A Palace of Pearls. In my book, all the last lines are in capitals, and they, in turn, make a last poem. The capitals are not meant as shouting, I wanted the last line of every poem to be more assertive, not just conclusive. Elytis’ use of capitalizing the final lines of poems functioned a little differently than what I was going for. I was hoping for the final lines of my poems to stand in contrast with what had already been written and generate something new.

HA: You were speaking before about the surrealist movement. The Spanish Surrealists seem to have had a strong influence on your work.

JM: Well, I love [ Federico García] Lorca. Some people say that he was more than a surrealist because he was also interested in folktales and puppetry. I think maybe the Spanish surrealists affected me more than anything else in my life because of their use of contrast- exciting colors and shapes outsized things and miniscule things and the mix of elements and numbers with serious passion and even tragedy. That liveliness of spirit and depth of feeling thrills me. I am moved by their sense of pageantry and soul searching. Lorca has really had a profound effect on me and I’ve just begun to scratch the surface on what he’s doing.

HA: How were you introduced to Lorca?

JM: I think by accident. I’m drawn to all those poets of extremity. That’s why I like Tennessee Williams. I like really intense provocative work. I recently saw a Tennessee Williams play in Now York with Jessica Lang. We pretty much read plays with the book in front of us because that’s how we have access to them unless we’re near a large city that’s having a production. It all came pouring into me again how beautifully provocative Williams is and how absolutely current his plays are.

HA: Have you ever considered writing plays? What about other genres?

JM: Well, I wrote a book of essays, which was way to hard; I don’t think I’ll do that again. I don’t know what got into me. I had been asked to write some individual pieces, which I could handle, but it just got more literary as I went on. I admire people who can do it- they’re brilliant. I just got excited by a lot of subjects but I don’t think linearly so my essays are a lot of work to read. I don’t know if I could do that again. I’ve always wanted to write a short novel. I’m a big admirer of Marguerite Duras. I love her work. She’s a French writer who writes these short intense novels. She’s also written films. Two of her books, The Lover and The War, are these single speaker, very small stories written with incredible intensity.

HA: What is your writing process like. What do you need to be able to write?

JM: I need a lot of quiet; I need a lot of space around that quiet. I write pretty quickly and not that often. I admire people who have a more regular practice but I’ve never been that kind of person; it’s very idiosyncratic with me. I wrote A Palace of Pearls very quickly and all at one time, which is unusual. Maybe I just didn’t want to be away from life too long. So I wrote it as quickly as I could.

HA: Do you revise much?

JM: Usually right away and then I wait and then I try to see how it is. I throw a lot out. I don’t believe in just changing a few lines; if it’s not good then you can’t just fix it a little bit you have to really be brave and just dump the sucker. I believe, and this is just one person’s view, that revision should be sure and swift. If you’re not sure then you’re not ready to revise. If you’re fiddling around with a poem you can kill it and if you’re not sure what you’re doing- you know, you wouldn’t mess with a person’s feeling if you didn’t know what you were doing, there’s no reason you should do that to a poem. You should be careful like you would with a real live human being. If you’re angry with someone, you want to count to ten. A poem deserves the same dignified response as another person would, I think.

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