Interview

Pamela Miller has published three books of poetry: Recipe for Disaster (Mayapple Press, 2003), Mysterious Coleslaw (Ridgeway Press, 1993), and Fast Little Shoes (Erie Street Press, 1986). She is also the author of the performance poetry piece “How to Handle a No-Good Man” and the broadside “Resignation Letter to the Boss from Hell” (Outrider Press, 1998). Her awards include three Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards for Poetry, First Prize in both the 1998 and 1999 Feminist Writers Guild poetry contests, First Prize in the Jo-Anne Hirshfield Memorial Poetry Awards, First Prize in the Rambunctious Review poetry contest, and First Place in ChicagoPoetry.com’s 2004 Frieda Stein Fenster Memorial Awards. She has also been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes. Pamela lives on Chicago’s Far North Side with her husband, science fiction writer Richard Chwedyk and 700 frogs.

When did poetry first become a part of your life?  How? At what age?

I didn’t “discover” poetry until after I graduated from high school (which was way back in 1969, if you can believe that!). I had always been a “word person” who was interested in writing in both grade school and high school, but I primarily wrote prose. When I was in sixth grade, I won first prize in a class short story contest—for this admittedly pretty outrageous piece of writing about a gorilla named Lizzie who liked to wear makeup, earrings and big floppy hats and chase good-looking men (humans, that is, not male gorillas).

            But I just couldn’t get into poetry in school, especially high school, mainly because nobody seemed to know how to teach it in a way that was enjoyable and meaningful to me as a teenager. I’ve heard similar things from other people, and I’m convinced that the reason so many Americans grow up to be allergic to poetry is that the schools just don’t know how to teach it in a way that doesn’t make it seem like an ordeal. I remember having to memorize huge long poems like “The Highwayman” by Walter de la Mare (I think). Making kids memorize poems, or making them analyze them to death instead of just reading and enjoying them, is a sure-fire way to make sure they’ll grow up to hate poetry for the rest of their lives. The other problem I had was that just about all of the poems I had to read in school seemed like they were very ancient and old-fashioned and musty and not at all relevant to what was really going on in the world or to what I was interested in as a young person in the Sixties—namely, rock music, anti-war politics, civil rights, the counterculture, etc.

            Finally, about a year after I had graduated from high school, somebody gave me a copy of Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind—and the rest, as they say, is history. It was just a complete revelation. “This,” I said to myself, “is more like it!”  I discovered that there was this whole world of other poetry out there, poetry that they didn’t teach you in school—poetry that was modern, experimental, politically engaged, funny, sexy, subversive. So I guess I owe everything to Larry Ferlinghetti, though ironically I “outgrew” him very quickly and don’t much care for his work these days. I don’t think his major works from the Sixties have stood the test of time very well, unlike the writing of other Beat poets like Ginsberg and Corso, whom I still enjoy reading today.

What was the first poem you ever loved and why?

To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember. But I can certainly talk about my favorite poem of all time: “Fresh Air” by the late “New York School” poet Kenneth Koch. This astounding piece of writing, which is pretty widely anthologized, is a huge long poem in five parts, it goes on for about five pages. It’s a manifesto about the problem of all the boring, dry, pretentious academic poetry being written out there and how poetry needs a sort of creative enema—the fresh air of the title—to blow all these cobwebs away and regain its sense of wonder, joy, imagination and freshness. Although it was written a generation ago (1962) it’s still 100% applicable to the current state of poetry today, where this type of debate of still going on.

            I love this poem, which has been a huge influence on my own work, for several reasons. First, it’s hysterically funny and fun to read, full of incredible silly wordplay and savage humor, and it’s bursting at the seams with wildly imaginative, creative energy—it’s a great big colorful slapstick Warner Brothers cartoon of a poem. I also like the way that it manages to be incredibly silly yet still says very important, valid things about what’s wrong with the state of poetry in America and what good poetry is supposed to be. I like the way it functions as a statement of poetics for Koch, making its points both in terms of content (the actual statements he is making about what constitutes good vs. bad poetry) and in terms of style (putting his money where his mouth is by writing in this uninhibited, crazy way that perfectly illustrates the type of “fresh” poetry he is advocating). Finally, I love it because Koch’s poetics are so similar to my own—I’ve always conducted my own little personal crusade against what I call Good Competent Poetry (GCP), which is safe, unimaginative poetry that contains no surprises—and I completely agree with everything this poem has to say.

When did you first begin truly calling yourself a poet?

I guess the obvious answer would be when I finally started to get a lot of my work published and started realizing that maybe I really was actually good at this stuff, that I actually maybe did have a certain amount of talent. This would have been around the late 1970s. It certainly took me long enough in college to figure out that this was what I really wanted to do. I kept changing my major, going from journalism to English literature to, finally, creative writing. I was sort of gradually closing in on it, narrowing my focus into smaller and smaller circles.

            But I think the real answer to your question is: When I finally began to realize—and I don’t remember when exactly this was, it certainly took a number of years—that “being a poet” is about much more than just the act of writing poetry. I came to understand that a poet is not just somebody who writes poems, but someone who has a certain way of looking at, and seeing, the world—a way that people who are not poets don’t have. For example, I think poets have much more curiosity about the world, and are able to see connections between seemingly unrelated things that other people don’t see. (My poem “Mysterious Coleslaw” came out of an experience where I was standing in a long, slow grocery checkout line and started to amuse myself by looking at strange combinations of items in people’s carts—a grater, a candle, a magazine--and thinking of odd ways they might be used together.) Making these connections and comparisons is where good poetic imagery comes from. I believe the poet’s “job” is to help readers share this experience of seeing the world in new and surprising ways.

How did your education inform your work as a writer?

The educational experience that had the most significant and lasting effect on my development as a writer was not part of my formal college education; rather, it was a small, informal poetry workshop that the late, great Chicago poet Paul Carroll (founder of the legendary Big Table magazine and author of The Luke Poems, Odes, The Poem in Its Skin, and The Garden of Earthly Delights) used to teach out of his home in Rogers Park during the 1970s and early ‘80s. I don’t remember exactly how I met Paul or how I got into his workshop, which was very selective, but he was an absolutely seminal figure in Chicago poetry for many years. For example, I believe he was the founder of the Poetry Center at the Art Institute, and in the ‘70s he did a wonderful radio show on WFMT (I think) called “The Name and Nature of Poetry.”

            Paul was an amazingly charismatic and colorful character, a wonderful poet and a truly great teacher. The Beloved Pedagogue, as he liked to refer to himself, taught me just about everything I know about poetry and was always wonderfully encouraging of me and my work. He was always expounding his philosophy about poetry, and many of his favorite sayings, which he would repeat over and over, continue to guide the way I work today. He would say things like: “Poetry, like baseball, is a game of inches,” and “Anything misheard is a poem.” The piece of advice he would give us most often was: “Our poems are wiser than we are.” This taught me to write much more instinctively, to trust my gut instincts and my subconscious, even if I wasn’t exactly sure where the poem was going or why.

Name some of the things---other poets art, music, culture-- that inspire your writing?

It’s almost always other poets, to the point where I deliberately choose to read certain books and writers because I know they will have any inspiring effect on my work. Whatever I’m reading at the time always ends up being reflected in my poems in one way or the other. I can always look back over a notebook of my poems and pick out all the ones that were inspired by something I was reading at the time. E.g., I would probably not have written the poem “Recipe for Disaster” if I hadn’t been reading The Curious Builder by Paul Violi—even though it doesn’t really sound like a Violi poem at all. So I can point to different poems and say, that’s my “Paul Violi poem,” my “James Tate poem” and so on.

            This doesn’t mean that I deliberately try to imitate the poets I’m reading, but rather that they seep into my subconscious and start interacting with all the other stuff that’s kicking around in there, such as events in my personal life. The poet I’m reading is just another ingredient that gets tossed into the stew. It’s that whole “our poems are wiser than we are” business again. The example I always like to use is the poem “Excerpts from a Surrealist Resume,” which was the result of my reading all these Surrealist poets like Franklin Rosemont at the same time that I had to update my resume and look for a job. Those two things came together in my head and I ended up writing that poem.

How did you first become part of the greater Chicago poetry scene?

Once again, this was all so long ago that I don’t even remember anymore. I’ve been part of the local poetry scene for almost 30 years now, so it just feels like I’ve been doing this forever. I can’t even remember where or when I did my first “real” poetry reading. I asked my husband, and he seems to think it was a reading I organized around 1977 or ’78 at a long-defunct counterculture bookstore in Evanston that was called The Whole Earth Center. I had just transferred into the Columbia College writing program (from Roosevelt University) to get my B.A. in poetry and the other readers were fellow students from my advanced poetry workshop, taught by Paul Hoover. Paul H. was certainly very aggressive in encouraging his best students to “go public” very early—to send work out to national magazines, do readings, get out in the poetry community and be visible and involved. So that definitely helped me get moving in that direction.

I remember in the early days going around to just about any venue that had a reading series and asking if I could read. Nobody had ever heard of me, so I usually had to prove myself by reading at an open mike first. Then they would decide that they liked my stuff and would let me do a solo reading. Another way I started breaking into the reading scene was by getting poems published in local literary magazines which would then organize readings featuring people they had recently published.

Talk a little about some of the different local cadres of writers you’ve been involved with over the years, publishers, reading venues.  What are your feelings on the city as a place for poets in general?

Well, as someone who’s been part of the Chicago poetry scene for 30 years, I’ve certainly seen an awful lot of poetry enterprises come and go—mostly go--over the years. There are a lot of now-defunct organizations that made hugely important contributions to the scene and really left a void behind them that has never been filled—or at least not in quite the same way.

            There were two organizations in particular that I still really miss today. One was the legendary Guild Books literary bookstore on Lincoln Avenue just north of Fullerton. This place was a true community center for everything that had to do with poetry. It had the biggest and most amazing selection of poetry books and literary magazines in Chicago; there’s absolutely nothing like it in the city today. It also had a great reading series—I read there several times—and it was extremely active in its mission of showcasing and promoting the work of Chicago poets. After the store shut down, Guild morphed into what is now called the Guild Complex—but it’s just not the same. The Guild Complex has always struck me as being a very cliquey and “in crowd”-ish group, without that democratic sense of community that Guild Books always had.

            The other defunct organization that someone really needs to bring back is the Feminist Writers Guild. I was involved with this important group off and on for many years. They kept going through various different administrations and permutations over the years, and there was often a lot of self-destructive political in-fighting within the group. Yet FWG provided a wonderful, unique forum for networking and championing the work of women writers and women’s issues, and once again it provided a real sense of community for people who were part of the feminist scene. The closest thing we have to FWG today is Woman Made Gallery, which is a wonderful organization, but is still somewhat more oriented toward visual artists than writers. It would be really nice to have some kind of feminist organization in Chicago that was exclusively for poets.

As a poet who straddles that line between being a well-published page poet and a great performer of your work how do you feel regarding that ever controversial divide between page and stage? How do you feel that divide informs your work?

I’ve always felt that the very best poetry works on both the page and the stage, and I write with that philosophy in mind. When you approach it from that perspective, the whole idea of a “divide” becomes nonexistent. It’s certainly a non-issue for me (other than the fact that there are certain poems I don’t perform on stage because I feel they don’t “read” well).

The only time I’m ever aware of a real divide is when you either have good page poets who don’t perform their work well (Charles Simic comes to mind) or performance poetry that doesn’t work on the page because there’s too much emphasis on the performance part and not enough on the poetry. I’ve heard plenty of bad poets, especially on the local scene (I won’t mention any names!) who can make their poetry sound a lot more interesting than it actually is by reading it in a very theatrical way. But when you read it on the page, it’s flat as a slice of American cheese—no imagery, no wordplay, no complexities, no imaginative use of language at all. What these people don’t understand is that the poetry has to perform, not just the poet. Deborah Pintonelli once said about my work that the images in my poems “work hard to entertain, to cajole the reader into seeing something.” I think that’s really the key.

How has the local scene changed and developed in the time you’ve been a part of?

Since I never really answered your earlier question about Chicago as a place for poets, I’ll expound on that here. Compared to certain other local poetry scenes I’ve experienced first-hand, such as New York and San Francisco, Chicago’s poetry scene strikes me as being very self-contained, family-like and a little insular. This is both its biggest strength and biggest weakness. On the one hand, it’s a very lively scene with lots of interesting things going on, plenty of opportunities for poets to carve out careers, and a lot of pride in the uniqueness and vitality of Chicago-style poetry. There’s certainly a real sense of community here.

            On the other hand, I continually get the feeling that Chicago’s poetry scene is too inwardly focused and even a little incestuous. There just doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest in what poets in other parts of the country and the world are doing. Unlike New York, there are very few opportunities to go to readings by nationally known poets—and on the rare occasions when out-of-town poets do come to Chicago, I never see anyone I know or any of the usual Chicago Poetry Scene suspects in the audience. A lot of Chicago poets seem to only be interested in going to the same old open mike venues week after week and hearing the same old people reading the same old stuff. When an artistic community is this insular, it’s really easy for stagnation to set in. I think the Chicago scene currently has way too much emphasis on open mikes and not nearly enough on reading series that showcase world-class poetry talent, especially avant garde and experimental writers. Paul Violi, for instance, has to my knowledge never read in Chicago.

            This tendency seems to have gotten worse over the years, and that would be my main answer to the question of how the scene has changed. The growth of performance poetry, slam and saloon venues is certainly exciting, but meanwhile, venues that give us a chance to hear what poets from outside the scene are doing keep dwindling. I also think that in recent years the scene has become more fragmented. Right now there seems to be lots and lots of contentious little factions that keep squabbling with each other when they really should be working together. Ten years ago, it was a lot easier for poets like me, who considered themselves “free agents” and didn’t belong to any particular group, to get along with all kinds of different poets from all the different groups. But today, I think “neutral” people like me are increasingly getting caught in the middle of these feuds, being forced to choose sides. I miss the days when you could be friends with poets A, B and C, as opposed to now, when A and B hate each other and you can’t do a reading with one without pissing off the other.

What are some of your favorite literary publications?  To be published by?  To read?  Locally?  Nationally?

Believe it or not, these days I hardly ever read literary magazines. I just read books of poetry. This is very similar to the way I listen to rock music nowadays: I gave up listening to the radio years ago and only listen to records. What’s happening in both cases is that the older I get, the more picky and selective I get. In poetry, as in music, I have very specific things I’m looking for, and I’d rather zero in on a book full of the kind of poetry I really want to read than waste a lot of time wading through magazines trying to cherry pick the few really imaginative, exciting, innovative poems out of a vast sea of GCP.