Jane Miller is a great source of energy and inspiration
for many of us here.
And it's a great joy for me to introduce her to you tonight.
She received a BA from Penn State and MA
from California State University,
and an MFA from the Writers Workshop
at the University of Iowa.
She's taught here at the University of Arizona
since 1986, and currently is director
of the creative writing program.
She's the author of Many Hearts, Many Juniper's in 1980,
The Greater Leisures chosen by Stanley Plumly for the National
Poetry series published in 1983.
Black Holes, Black Stockings, the collaboration
with Olga Broumas published in '85.
American Odalisque from Copper Canyon in 1987.
Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected Poems
from Copper Canyon in 1996.
And this year, Wherever You Lay Your Head from Copper Canyon.
Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEAs,
and a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Award,
among other things.
Miller's experimental curricula have
made her a legendary teacher.
She's taught such seminars as "Line and Curve," "Discourse
on Polaroid," "Improvisational Composition in Music
and Poetry," "Feminism and Semiotics."
And as I recall one called simply "Time."
Her reading list is as likely to include
Stephen Hawking or Jackson Pollock
as Gertrude Stein or Adrienne Rich.
And that eclecticism of mind is a lead in to her work.
Miller has taken the passionate intensity of Sappho
and exploded it into an encompassing
post-nuclear rhapsody, in which grief and love dance
hand in hand as the millennium fades to black.
The new book is pared back to more halting rhythms,
inspired by the master Japanese printmaker, Ando Hiroshige.
Poems in which the bondage between the American Southwest
and Hiroshima is laid bare.
And the perversity of technology's worst invention
meets the beauty of art's transcendent dream.
Please welcome Jane Miller.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thanks, Alison.
Can you hear me?
"In a long text on live TV, in an amphitheater, in the soil.
After the postmoderns, after it's still proven
you can get a kiss out of a pretty girl,
after the meta ritual lectures and Heinz switches
to plastic squeeze bottles.
As one flies into St. Louis listening to Lorca's
Luna, Luna, Luna, beyond Anacin time.
After, God help us, the dishwasher is emptied again,
and Ms. America, Ms. Mississippi reveals
she has entered 100 pageants since age six.
Packers ball, first down after a fumble, the corn detasseled,
the assembly of enthusiasms awakened.
And we meet in a car by a river, not not kissing,
considering making love, visiting Jerusalem,
the awful daily knowledge that we
will have to die in a hospital on the sixth floor
or on live TV, or in an amphitheater at halftime,
or at one's parent's condo over pasta,
or in a strange relative's arms along the coast.
The heart bumping, bumping the old pebble up the old spine,
a squirrel scared up a sycamore by an infant.
Along this stench of humility, along that highway
of cum charge card in hand, I will give my time freely.
And the more I dissemble, the more I resemble.
The better, the faster I sleep, the more I
remember to go elsewhere.
A movie, excuse me, now I must whisper
not to disturb the patrons.
Now I must drive, park, tramp to the edge of the world,
roughness, ferocity, cannibalism, bite, chew,
transmogrified inside the lungs, the little revolutionaries
between the thighs, the reflex, it's too this, it's too that.
It's not enough.
Similarly and more particularly, it's raw twice over.
It's the imagination draining its husks left handed,
because comparison is motive, which is why
one writes with one's desire.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thanks.
That was called "Miami Heart" named after a hospital in South
Florida.
This next poem is set in California--
Northern California.
I hope you'll recognize some of the landmarks there.
The old Giants stadium and the airport.
Although it begins many centuries ago before jumping up
to our own time and place.
It's addressed to many of us here tonight.
It's called "The Poet."
"You would procure the oil of forgiveness
from the angel at the doors and get a small branch
for a tree that finds no use until it
becomes a bridge over a river.
You have a premonition while crossing about the wood's fate
and rather than go further cross on foot.
The wood lies dormant for centuries until it's dug up
and three victims die on it scattering the Jews,
unable to discern the cross from those of two thieves.
You place them in the pit of a city
and in the early hours hold each above your head with the third
are brought to life, zipping between buildings
at high speed, shifting into fifth
out some disembodied ramp.
The thrill in the air sexual, the ballpark
darkened, the hologram of the shut airport glowing.
Your headlamps trained on mall light in fog
made more intimate and infinite by the collapse of time.
Cement bits ceiling your swirled space
to the strains of violins.
It's the dawn of an era, and time does not improve it.
You live in a sunny place and work in a sealed building.
10 miles per hour on interstate 405 by the year 2000.
The 20th century begun in Vienna has ended in California.
Gas meters on your left, electric meters on your right.
The head out in the light.
A flight of concrete stairs as you
climb, you see the big towers of the financial district 50
storeys high a few blocks away.
The sense of entering a city nobly,
walking the freeway at night before it's torn down,
hearing Portuguese, German, Japanese, French, Chinese,
seeing views of the Bay, metallic, choppy,
and the suspension bridge and the ships.
This is over.
About the demolition, a few warnings
like those about the earthquake.
The clack in the streets of Vienna, a carriage door
slamming and a continuous fountain, though far away,
seem no farther than the broken freeway.
The bells of the tower quiet, the stone smooth and brilliant
in moonlight.
You are in a car with music and air conditioning
and the phone, softly the classical station massages you.
You know in the back of your head,
the best of your creative life has been siphoned away
by desire and money, desire in general and money
in comparison with others, yet between one abstraction
and another, uou yourself quietly and fiercely
participate in a disappearing place.
One you loved and were prepared to enter with great humility,
bathed in tears and barefoot."
[APPLAUSE]
I'd like to present a few poems now from my new book
that Alison mentioned, Wherever You Lay Your Head, which
regards the making of weapons of mass destruction
here in our own Southwest and in California.
And the dropping of those bombs on the Japanese
during the middle of the century.
This first poem is set on the campus of the University
of California Davis.
Although it opens with the shipment
of some nuclear weapons along the California coast.
Actually, it's about some dogs.
"The Voiceless Beagles of Davis."
"A barge steams from Concord station
under six bridges through the Carquinez Strait
and into San Pablo Bay with another safe delivery
by ancient sailors who project in golden sunset
the silhouette of youth next to the latest small bazooka
like device, Davy Crockett representing America.
Such that when I step out on my porch in ancient summer
light in spring Wednesday at the end of the century in which,
with few exceptions, those who favored a prior warning
to the enemy later argued for more weapons,
while those who recommended the bomb
spoke after war of disarmament.
So all clear is the dusk
it can drown the silent howling of the beagles being zapped
with 60 millirems of radiation at the nearby campus,
their cords cut so they won't bark
their sacrifice at bicyclists going by,
whereas the vacuum of the moon prevents life.
I shall lay a spray of small flowers
down at the end of advanced time because I want someone
to recognize the bergamot, orange blossom,
peach, and rose in the humble gardens on the streets of Venus
when we are forced to kill again with clubs."
These poems move back and forth from the states over to Japan.
And the more I read and the more I learned,
the shorter my poems got.
This next one is pretty short and takes as its title "A Line
From A Military Pamphlet."
"In such a way that nothing could go wrong,
a low stratum of mushroom cloud begins slowly
to move over the park in a North northwesterly direction,
and 20 or 30 minutes later terrain radioactive building
block and human remains onto still living stick figures.
And thus with a fireball to evaporate
a paradise of hackberry trees.
Two waitresses pedaling to a noodle shop downtown
see the last of the freshness of dawn fume
into the regular traffic and trade of oblivion.
100,000 fall in the city like blossoms along a riverbank.
Some crawl, burned and faceless, into the rising river.
Poor memory, too tired to rest, especially in summer
or in the sun."
Back in the States again, back in our own backyard--
300 miles or so from here.
"Dave's Dream."
"From where he stands over the ubiquitous flames
300 and some odd miles away, layering mesquite
among his toxic coals for the perfect finish,
it looks like somebody opened a refrigerator at night
in daylight, and this purplish pink glow
like the light from home appliances
throughout the remote Southwest and beyond, Vegas, et cetera.
This hot light from which he's divided by a cyclone fence
is another successful experiment to etch the retinas of rabbits
and desert rats, many of which lurch blindly
now toward his barbecue, his miniature smoking Earth,
curl up on his radioactive chaise
and beg for the remaining pierced, marinated, charred,
spit-flamed, and rotated on this Earth to be saved.
Well, the Millers go to Japan.
My mother, my father, my brother and me.
The sushi eaters: we are the bourgeoisie
in clean cotton kimonos with lacquered plates
and chopsticks.
Our deceased father Walt pinches a California roll.
Our mother Florence nibbles yellow tail
on a torpedo of rice.
We wear cool sunglasses to the parade on the fifth day
of the fifth month.
Boys hoist banners of painted carp.
Citizens throw back their catch off crowded bridges
into cold streams.
Lost souls surface in ceremonial robes.
Our host dresses in strips of kelp with an upside down basket
on his head on the brim of which sits citrus.
Huge wood pestle stuck in his sash,
white puffs of plum blossom peep from the garden
behind the teahouse.
The paddies beyond are still rubble.
Young Dr. Teller's face like tuna
illumined with wasabi and soy, suntanned an oiled
with protection against his test bomb--
fire eaters, one is forced to travel on crutches."
Well as I started saying my poems got shorter and shorter;
these then turned into haiku.
I think you recognize whether we're over here or over there.
Although, it is getting quite the same, isn't it?
"Shopping in the mall for exercise equipment,
large ships drift ashore.
Invention or fantasy?
Men with large exploding guns.
Hot dogs on the wharf, braised chicken cacciatore, tourists
bloat North Beach.
One who criticizes here may well be ephemeral.
Sailing in the Bay, beauty the great poet's dream,
danger, rescue, all drunken tradesmen, idlers, popes,
lashed to poles for safe passage.
One may sigh and primp, one may analyze one soul, warheads
transported, offshore glide non-stop wake up,
foragers find their morels.
Entertaining guests dragonflies love
to alight on water buckets, show off in the defense lab,
Nova laser misfires."
I'm going to close with a poem that is really a fairy tale,
and like most fairy tales a lot of this is true, for example,
my father makes an appearance in this poem.
And in fact, I'd like to dedicate this poem tonight
to my mother who is here.
And hi, mom, glad to see you.
Thanks for coming.
She's not in this one, but that's OK.
"Two shops dealing in tie-dyed fabrics: a fairy tale.
In a town famous long ago for its field of irises
and its bridge with seven sections like a poem,
and an annual horse market and scattered clouds,
I stroll on holiday with my wife.
I have brought her here for a rest and to buy her silk.
She worked so hard thinking for so little,
and for untoward people for whom a kindness is
a mysterious thing they must acquiesce
to like a wild animal, a monkey or deer.
All day on the hunt for mushrooms, chestnuts and bugs.
It's true, the office has made them sad.
We stroll the shops along the quay.
She takes my hand and for that honor,
I blush and set my shoulders square
and smile at children for only they
aren't embarrassed by my joy.
Nine years of good luck such that silks
are not enough, but must suffice for I
have spent much on this trip already
on an inn and meals and wine.
The wine, especially, made my wife fiery and pure.
Last night she whispered and sang original lyrics
to old tunes, taking my name on a rhyming
tour of gardens and oceans.
The sea especially made me weep and her, too, and in that bath
we slept.
She begs me not approach the stall for already she is full,
but lemon and orange silks and the watermelon
reds of her youth burst from a passing cloud.
So too, her face squints in the lights
and the owner on one leg because of the war
is so happy to see her.
She has the price and doubles the shawls.
I feel I know her from some other world,
but drifting unintentionally to her single shoe.
I lose her glance to a shyness.
My love wishes to see the irises; not many this year.
We muse about the weather.
At the far end, a second shop of tie-dyed ware,
the owner strangely again familiar.
This time, I meet his eyes with my heart
and recognize my father back from his losing war
with cancer.
Father, Walter, I try a rush of names,
sailor, lover, I take him on a rhyming tour.
But he vanishes across the first of many bridges, which
are hoisted by hand when a boat with high masts
passes by men of humble birth, scarved
in baggy purple and green pants.
And though I run like a wave over the seven
bridges of the town of the world, he is nowhere.
My wife loves me through my loss,
which because of my selfishness, she
describes as a short passage from here to there.
I ought to let him take a loan without thinking that death
is like dying and suffering.
This draws me ever closer to my wife.
My father's light blue light wraps around us.
We hear distant hooves and earthquakes
as if a giant bridge is lifting.
Not a single horse, but 100, 200 haunches flying
and dust mingling with clouds all eternity
in an afternoon of snorting and neighing
nostrils of song and prayer.
This is a fairytale town on a route paved
for an emperor painted in afternoon light
where the poor wear silk because merchants give it for a song.
Horses leap over water to pasture and bridges
rise and fall on heart and soul.
I sing my love, I take her on a rhyming
tour among the few white irises of poetry,
most honored subjects of early spring
as I am found here romancing among lost grasses."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thank you for joining Eleni and for joining me tonight.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]