Wayne Miller is the author of five poetry collections, most recently We the Jury (Milkweed, 2021) and Post- (2016), which won the Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award. He has co-translated two books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo—most recently Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015), which was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation—and he has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed, 2016). The recipient of six awards from the Poetry Society of America, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize, and a Fulbright to the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Wayne co-directs the Unsung Masters Series and teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, where he edits Copper Nickel.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: I don’t know if I’ve read a collection that scales up and dials down in scope quite as much as We the Jury: from an interrogation of the nation called Death or international war on terror to foreclosure or a miscarriage, this book runs the gamut. So I’d like to start with “Two Thousand and Nine,” a middle-distance piece stemming from the sub-prime crisis during which a family loses their home. The poem has haunted me since my first reading, as the speaker writes: “we felt / as if the rooms would stay ours / just because we moved through them…when we left / we put the kids in their seats and simply / backed out of the driveway…since the moment had foreclosed upon us / we found a new moment to slip into.” Later, through an Internet search the speaker finds images of the house where “From one angle, / there’s you on the porch / —face blurred out— / in a bright blouse I no longer / remember you owning.” Erasure results from dispossession, and an eerie amnesia seeps in as well. Are you writing against forgetting? What does money have to do with the re-membering or witness your poems give?

WM: When my father died in the midst of the Great Recession, his house was profoundly underwater, and I walked away from probate so I wouldn’t have to assume responsibility for his massive debt—which meant I was bombarded for many months with calls and emails trying to get me to change my mind before the bank ultimately foreclosed. The reality is that money and debt are the surface upon which so many of our lives float—they’re fundamental to countless lyric spaces (cities, rooms, cars, etc.)—and yet neither money nor debt seems to show up in poetry in proportion to its importance. Which is why I’ve tried to find room for both in my poems.

After my daughter was born in 2011 my wife and I began looking for a suitable house—and it was easy to find one fairly cheap in Kansas City (where we lived at the time) because so many neighborhoods were pocked with foreclosures. Many of the foreclosures had also been gutted before the previous owners left. (Indeed, I had done a fair amount of “gutting” of my father’s house before I walked away from it.)

That struck me as both a very literal story about a particular moment in American history and, simultaneously, a metaphor for how time regularly ejects us from the moments we inhabit—and how we try to carry aspects of those moments into the future. I wanted this poem to contain both of those ideas, the literal and the figurative. I also found that I wanted to think about how strangely time works on the internet, where now, after seven years in Denver, I can still go look at the interior of that house we once owned in Kansas City, full of our stuff.

In those regards, I am certainly writing against forgetting (as all writing is, on some level)—not just against forgetting a particular moment in history, but also against forgetting the importance of small narratives inside of history.

CL: Yes, and it seems that even when ejected from those moments we can never fully leave them—maybe only choose how to view them, and watch for what we’ll become. In the book’s second poem “On Progress” the speaker begins by describing his grandmother’s attendance at the last public US hanging, moves to her mental illness, then to the clip of Saddam Hussein’s execution, and on to a meditation on language itself, which might fall away any moment.

“Now / watch me pull back the scrubber bar— // his body lifted by the tip of my finger— / and let him drop again” the speaker writes, even as he asks those at the execution why they won’t “rush forward / to save him? Impossible // this doesn’t happen.”

While some poems propel by sound, or image, or story, even, others generate their heat from juxtaposition. How do you decide what touches what, or even what enters a poem in the first place? Does placing a small narrative inside a larger history require special attention? And how do you see silence operating in your work?

WM: Juxtaposition places a strategic silence—a refusal to explain—between ideas or images, and the reader is asked to make sense of that silence. Thus, the poet says things with the reader, rather than at the reader, which is what I like about juxtaposition.

When I place Saddam Hussein’s execution next to the execution of Rainey Bethea, I’m implying a question about violent spectacle and historical progress. I’m not making an argument in part because I truly don’t know how much progress has occurred since Bethea’s killing. In fact, what I find so fascinating (and horrifying) about that moment in 1936 is how much of today is there: racism and violence; an interest in a historic “first” (the first execution by a woman); an antagonism between “coastal media elites” and people from the Ohio River Valley. And since I’m generally opposed to the death penalty, I find both executions—and the massive audiences for them—pretty terrible.

In the process of writing “On Progress”—which required a fair amount of research—I found I wanted to do a couple of things: (1) I wanted to implicate both myself and our historical moment in violence and violent spectacle—and, thus, question the notion of progress. (2) I wanted to consider a basic paradox of humanism—that the condemned man’s fundamental humanity means he has essential, unnegatable value, while, at the same time, the condemning mob’s desire to negate his humanity also seems to be a fundamental human impulse. (3) I wanted to consider how that sort of paradox manifests in my response to an individual—namely, my grandmother, who attended a grotesque, racist execution without any hint of remorse, and who also experienced prejudice and suffered deeply from mental illness and personal loss. How do I make sense of the complex totality of her life? I simply don’t know the answer. I suspect different readers will come to different conclusions—which the poem allows for.

Basically, for some time, I’ve been interested in the relationship between personal, domestic narratives and broad, historical metanarratives—between the “private” and the “public.” (This is part of why the book dials up and down in scope so much.) “On Progress” is a poem where my own family bridges the gap—present to past, family history to historical event. And I’m interested, generally, in writing my way into moments where there’s not a clear place for me to stand—where, to paraphrase Yeats, the poem arises out of an argument with myself.

CL: It seems not just juxtaposition, but juxtaposition of irreconcilables that counters the common tendency to flatten—cancel, lionize, or utterly condemn—because that’s the simpler thing. The ability to hold a messy (dare I say merciful? dare I say generous?) view seems rare today. We see another instance of this in “On History,” when the speaker describes afternoons sailing with a friend of his father’s, a friend convicted of murdering a Black woman who subsequently goes on to a prestigious career and considerable leisure. At the end of the poem the speaker grapples with what he cannot reconcile—his memory of George Trabing and archived articles detailing the crime. Often I think of poems as my coping mechanism to sit with or work out what I can’t live with otherwise—to stand in those impossible places. How are poems uniquely suited to lead us where we cannot stand? And what relationship does your relatively minimalist style have with the messy places they lead readers?

WM: I think of poetry as an intimate art. When I observe the narrative action in a novel or a story, I can feel other people around me also observing that action, like being at a play or a film. When I read an essay, I feel a bit like I’m listening in a lecture hall. With poetry, the feeling I usually have is of being alone with the poet; she’s speaking in that moment just for me across the page. This is, I think, poetry’s chief power; the intimate, often vulnerable space it creates is uniquely suited to taking on complex, uncertain problems and subjects. I’m perfectly happy to hear someone present preestablished arguments to a room full of people at a lecture; but I rarely want to be dissertated at when I’m alone with someone.

I understand that not everyone thinks about—or experiences—poetry the way I do. But for me—and for most of the poets I admire—intimacy is part of what feel special about the art.

That said, I also want my poems to be crafted; I want the language to feel hard-won. When I started out as a poet I loved metaphor for its own sake, but the longer I write, the more I feel a need to pare my poems down—to justify every word. I like to think there’s a tension between uncertainty and vulnerability on one side, and intentional craft on the other—that they pull against each other throughout a poem, if that makes sense. My poems are certainly not chatty; they’re not openly or vulnerably talking (though there are many chatty, talky poets I like). Rather, they’re a kind of crafted performance in an intimate space, and what’s being performed is a genuine grappling with uncertainty or difficulty.

CL: Metaphor is such a powerful tool and yet I forget using it carelessly can enact harm, too. For example, lately when one of my favorite young ball players drives to the basket or muscles out a rebound, announcers exclaim he “is an animal”; I cringe every time. But metaphor in We the Jury is sparse, and many moments that might veer that way remain, perhaps uncomfortably, literal. I think of the poem “Parable of Childhood” in which a young boy refuses to admit that his dog has “returned to the earth” and keeps bringing the body inside. The piece ends: “The dog was gone—that was clear. // But the dog was also right there, just below the surface, / packed in darkness. The boy could bring her back inside / whenever he wanted— // no matter what his parents said.”

Even within the frame of parable, I’m struck by the image of a dirty box and a child peering inside, waiting for transformation. Without metaphor, does image stand in for transformation? How (or do) you employ titles to convert your poetic eye into revelation?

WM: I think more than anything I’ve become less interested in metaphor that feels primarily ornamental or merely dislocating. There’s actually, I think, a fair amount of figuration in We the Jury, but it’s less about transforming an isolated moment of a poem and more about transforming an experience or idea in a way that’s integral to the poem as a whole—and often the poem’s title plays a role in revealing what’s being represented. Thus, e.g., the feeling of stillness one has on an airplane while barreling along at high speed becomes a metaphor for middle age; landing in a city one didn’t intend to land in is a metaphor for the unanticipated future. A group of bombs falling together toward impact represents a generation, and dragging one’s gaze through a dead woman’s written notes feels like combing her hair.

By the end of “Parable of Childhood,” the dog in the box (at least in my reading) comes to represent the boy’s memory—and the power he, as an individual, has over it. His parents would like him to move on—perhaps in the interest of his general wellbeing, or perhaps simply to make their lives easier—but the boy really wants to understand what he’s living; he neither wants to bury his experience (of loss, in this case) nor simply walk away from it. And so the box—like memory—becomes a contested object. No matter how much his parents want to control his relationship to it, his memory is entirely his—and he will do with it what he wants.

CL: I appreciate hearing you talk about the way the dog in the box represents memory. As I read it, I think about the very real passing of life—how we can excavate relicts of it, until we can’t, any longer. A figure is a figure until it isn’t—and then “literally” applies. The space where that happens often terrifies me, as can the space of a plural first person. Which I have to ask about, since this collection so often uses “we.” In the title poem “we know that we will determine the facts / and those facts will become the surface / upon which the world rests” even as “our innocence could well require that we find ourselves guilty.” In this piece “we” are both defendants and deliberators; likewise, “we” fluctuates throughout the book—sometimes it refers to the middle class, or middle aged, or Americans, or white folks, or a couple—so that I found myself trying to discern for whom the speaker speaks. Can you speak to this vantage point and how you see the pronoun variously grounding the collection?

WM: Using “we” in an American poem is complex and potentially fraught. We live in a profoundly diverse society, and a broad, abstracted “we” often runs the risk of flattening or misrepresenting diverse experiences. At the same time, we also live in a country built around mythologies of individualism and historical exceptionalism, and American poems that focus entirely on an “I”—that present individuals as fully disconnected from larger social and socio-historical contexts—run the risk of buying into or perpetuating individualist and exceptionalist notions.

Which is to say: I’m suspicious of poems that use a “we” that feels abstracted and totalizing—poems that make universal statements outside of time like (these are silly, made-up examples) “we turn loss into love” or “we swim in loneliness.” At the same time, I’ve become increasingly suspicious of poems that present an “I” operating in a vacuum or at the center of a universe.

Much of my poetic education involved reading non-American poets. My undergrad poetry professors were all translators, and in grad school I studied with Adam Zagajewski, who on the very first day of my first grad workshop (back in—yikes!—2000) explained that he was “tired of little American poems by little American poets,” and that our only assignment for the semester was to “write an elegy for the twentieth century.” Add to that the fact that I was a history major in college, and I quickly became interested in what I’ll call, here, a kind of “Eastern European ‘we,’” where the “we” operates not as a totalizing abstraction but, rather, as a witnessing “we” of the present. (Adam once said, “We should be kind to the dead; there are so many more of them than there are of us.” That’s the sort of “we” I’m taking about.)

After receiving your question, I went through We the Jury and made a little note of how each “we” works when it comes up in its particular poem. I found they fall into four basic categories: (1) a “we” of the present moment (e.g., “The News”—though in that poem the speaker is also someone, clearly not me, being interviewed on a news program); (2) a couple/family in a domestic space (e.g., “After the Miscarriage”); (3) a small, narratively specific group (e.g., the men dismantling a barn in “The American Middle Class”); and (4) a dramatized group collectively speaking (e.g., the dead rich in “Afterlife of the Rich”).

I think at a certain point when I was writing We the Jury I decided I wanted to use “we” at the outer edges of my comfort level, also understanding that I needed to find ways to limit the collectivities that show up in the book. I mostly did that situationally. In the title poem, the situation is specific and symbolic—a jury has been tasked with passing judgment on itself. That, to me, represents the wrangle of secular humanism and, more simply, of the present moment—which is a specific narrative situation that stands in opposition to the rest of time and that we’re all tangled up in.

CL: Even as I ask about “we,” I do so mainly because I love it—that there could be a “we” vantage point from which to write feels wildly hopeful. And daunting. Not unlike that “elegy for the twentieth century” prompt; I don’t know that little American me is adequate for the task, or that anyone would want to read my attempt! But I would argue it’s a certain type of “I” that speaks as disconnected from larger social and socio-historical contexts—I couldn’t imagine the “I” of Audre Lorde in this way, or Adrienne Rich, or Yusef Komunyakaa, for example—and that in many instances to write from “I” where “I” has not even been considered noteworthy is an act of resistance, of complicating literature’s scope. Which leads me to wonder if maybe it isn’t the singular or collective point of view that is problematic, but a hubristic or narcissistic one?

In one of my favorite poems in the book, “The Future,” the speaker describes a bird in an airport terminal, the inability to get it to board the plane and fly away, and then the speaker’s arrival. At the end of the poem, the “I” and “we” collapse quite beautifully:

we were together
in that daze of arrival—

carried reflexively
by the moving sidewalk,

the sky train—until
I was already well

inside the city I must
assume was arriving

suddenly into each of us.

The impossibility of knowing another and this endless attempt, despite, are what move me in poems. How do you balance the need to speak on behalf of a “we of the present moment” with that one-on-one intimacy you mentioned earlier as poetry’s chief power? What role does empathy play in this balance, and in your drafting process?

WM: Oh, I’m never sure that little American me is up to the task, either! And certainly there’s nothing wrong with “small” poems. Many of the poems I love are quietly personal or funny or just interestingly observational. But in grad school I was a former history major who had not yet figured out how to incorporate this sustained interest of mine into poetry. Sometimes it’s important just to be given permission—and Adam not only gave me permission to start exploring history as material for poetry, but he also said that it was a valuable thing to do.

And you’re absolutely right that not all “I’s” operate in a vacuum—and, further, that the “I” of an underrepresented or marginalized voice has the potential to do a very different kind of work than an “I” such as mine. I’m not saying every poet should think about poetry the same way I was when I was writing We the Jury; I’m only saying that this is what I was thinking as the book was coming together.

At the end of the day, as Franz Wright says, we write what we’re “given to write.” I don’t think most writers can assert a lot of conscious control over their innate subjects, which arrive through a combination of natural interests and lived experiences. But writers can continue to complicate those subjects by thinking broadly about what literature is and can do, and by maintaining a healthy skepticism toward the narrow aesthetic assumptions of the moment. In We the Jury, part of my attempt to complicate involved trying to find space between the opposed ideas that a poet should never use “we” and that using “we” is just always OK. My hope was (and is) to make poems that are neither hubristic nor narcissistic, as you so aptly name the gutters into which poetry can slip.

In that ending of “The Future,” the speaker is aware of his experience as an individual, yet he also understands that others must be having the same experience of surprise at what “the future” of their plane trip has become (i.e., they’ve arrived in a city they didn’t intend). One of my ongoing interests in history involves thinking about how collective metanarratives both do and don’t govern (or express) our individual lives, and the simultaneous “I” and “we” at the end of “The Future” is a place where the speaker is realizing that his personal experience does connect with the collective experience of those who were on his flight—that as individuals they’re all together in this moment.

For me, poetry’s intimacy is less about a poem’s subject matter (which could be anything, including vastly “public” subjects) than about how poetry as an art form communicates, which feels to me intimate, interiorized, and multivalent—which is why poetry provides, in my opinion, such an excellent place to wrestle with uncertainties and indeterminacies, whatever the subject.

CL: This weekend I was talking with a group of high school students about odes, and the form’s original connection to public events. The idea of ‘public’ poems seemed entirely foreign to them, which reminded me also of Solmaz Sharif lamenting the dearth of public intellectuals, and public American poets. While your pieces are subtle, to a certain extent, they often do use that horizontal lens of history, and call readers into a public sphere. I think of “The Reenactment,” where a boy chases his dog, Buster, through a battle scene. From the “colony of lawn-chairs” he interrupts history until ultimately “led triumphantly from the battlefield / toward the bright colors of the future / where we all now / were standing to receive them.” The lack of punctuation and scene progressing clause by prepositional phrase unfolds much as history does; once in the future, we’re repeating the same violences. Sometimes people listen extra close to hear the quietest voice—so I wonder if this is a conscious strategy of yours? Do you see yourself and work as engaging in a public poetics?

WM: This is a complicated question!

I think “The Reenactment” is, on the surface, an optimistic poem. Wars end, and in this poem the boy and his dog end up walking out of the battle toward the mundane, post-war future of lawn chairs and gym shoes—which makes this unintended version of a war “reenactment” more complete, in a way. And yet, the desire to reenact past battles seems to point to a fundamental human interest in violence, which is the poem’s dark underbelly.

When (e.g.) James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, and Susan Sontag used to appear on the Dick Cavett Show, there were just three networks. Now Americans can assert more control over their media diets, and the majority of people just aren’t that interested in intellectual content. (I suspect they weren’t back then either; they just had fewer choices.) Plus, the intellectual Right has been gutted internally, which further complicates the national conversation. I actually think there are, today, a number of public intellectuals coming specifically from literature—including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Judith Butler, Roxane Gay, Claudia Rankine, and Cathy Park Hong—but it’s harder for them to reach the broad center of American culture than it was for their predecessors. (Which is, I think, part of what Solmaz Sharif is lamenting.)

Though I certainly think about the public sphere in a good number of my poems, I don’t really believe that poems change the public sphere—at least not directly. (Note that the above writers tend to become visible through nonfiction and/or social media.) Most US poetry readers agree at the outset on 90% of political issues (and, likely, 98% of political goals), and the rest of America sees poetry as an absurd and anachronistic frivolity. If I want to move the country in a political direction, I’m very unlikely to do so through poetry, where at best I’ll probably reach an audience of a few thousand similarly-minded individuals. (Though it’s possible some of those individuals might end up influencing the public sphere outside the realm of poetry.)

And yet, I think there’s real value in thinking in poetry about the historical moment we inhabit, because people don’t generally live in isolation from sociopolitical reality. To consider a person’s experience of the world is, in part, to consider her relationship to the public sphere. Which is to say that I agree with Czeslaw Milosz’s idea that witnessing an individual’s experience of the historical moment is a valuable thing for a poet to do, and, at the same time, I agree with Zbigniew Herbert that trying to influence the course of history through poetry is “vanity.” And I think Jericho Brown is right that poems absolutely “change persons” (poems have certainly changed me!) but don’t generally “change people.”

And still, I do speak softly in my poems. Part of that is just temperament. But I’m also interested in considering paradoxes and indeterminacies in my work, and I think people are often less eager to think in nuanced terms about the public sphere, where we sometimes feel pressure to hold consistent and coherent positions. Stridency probably wouldn’t help me communicate—or, more importantly, arrive at—the type of complexity I’m interested in.

CL: If you met someone with limited exposure to poetry and had the opportunity to give the person (not people!) one poem, which piece would you share?

WM: Thanks so much, Cate, for the time you’ve spent with We the Jury; I’m so grateful for your thoughtful and probing questions. And I love this last one.

What I’m looking for, here, is a “gateway poem”—which to me means a poem (1) where the language and approach are relatively accessible, (2) where the poem is recognizable as a poem to someone who maybe once read a couple Frost poems in high school, and (3) where the poem still communicates a kind of nuanced or layered complexity that is, for me, central to what poetry is. There are, of course, a ton of excellent poems that meet these criteria, and I have my own little collection that I’ve put together over the years for teaching.

But if I have to pick just one: I really love Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”—which is maybe an obvious choice, and for good reason. It’s accessible and expresses the near-universal experience of reassessing childhood through the lens of adulthood. It’s a very loose sonnet, and therefore offers a bridge between free verse and some of the formal expectations a layperson might have about poetry. It’s emotionally complex—its argument is a kind of “both/and”—and it does subtly complicated things with perspective and time. Plus, it’s just stunningly made. I mean, who doesn’t arrive at the quiet precision of those “austere and lonely offices” and think “now that’s a hell of a poem”?