An Interview with E. Ethelbert Miller
An interview with E. Ethelbert Miller, originally published in Little Patuxent Review in 2020.
Interviewing E. Ethelbert Miller is like trying to keep track of everyone’s names at a crowded cocktail party after downing a couple of glasses of something potent.
Miller’s fifty-year immersion in the poetry world means that he befriended and interviewed people like Sterling Brown and Amiri Baraka (and does spot-on imitations of them) and gave a boost to writers such as Elizabeth Alexander, Ta Nehisi Coates, Charles Johnson, Dwayne Betts, and Cornelius Eady. Faster than one can jot them on a soggy napkin, Miller throws out names and titles and conferences and institutions and acronyms, punctuated with his trademark giggles.
The gossip is juicy–who hooked up with whom at the AWP Conference, which Howard University professor called which other professor a profanity that rhymes with other-clucker to his face, what the hitchhiking poet was wearing when he started the reading that Miller organized for him in the 1970s. The poet read while he was stripping off his militant jacket, his tie-dye shirt, finally “he’s standing up there buck naked,” Miller recalls, cackling the whole time he’s telling the story.
Along with being a fantastic storyteller, Miller is a literary activist as much as a poet. He networks, pens letters of introduction and recommendation, writes critical essays, lobbies to get writers on postage stamps (Maya Angelou on a stamp from Ghana, for instance), edits anthologies, attends conferences, and writes reviews for the New York Journal of Books. He founded and directed the Ascension Poetry Series, the longest-running D.C. poetry reading series. For decades, he co-edited Poet Lore, the nation’s oldest poetry magazine.
Often called D.C.’s dean of poets, Miller answers the door of his D.C. rowhouse in purple-framed glasses and a purple hoodie emblazoned with Gonzaga Basketball, where his son (now an award-winning coach) flourished on their team.
After turning off the jazz playing on the speaker in the kitchen, Miller settles himself at his dining room table, and gently scolds his rescue Siamese, Eden, purring around his legs. Family pictures crowd the top of the piano, papers and books are stacked on the table, and a chandelier hangs over a fading Valentine’s bouquet.
With a career that stretches from the Black Arts Movement to today’s Cave Canem and Dark Room Collective, Miller has been writing poems and talking up poets for fifty-two years.
But his longest tenure was as the director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University, a position he held for forty years that was terminated in 2015 without warning. His dismissal prompted letters of protest and support from people like Alexander, who told The Washington Post, “To me, it’s a sad day for Howard to lose Ethelbert Miller. Generations of writers – myself included – have made the trek to see him as budding young creative people committed to the art of the African diaspora. His generosity is legion.”
Generous, certainly. But not tolerant of insult or ignorance. Miller doesn’t do many readings nowadays – too much snapping after poems, most people haven’t read his work, and he does not do spoken word, he explains unapologetically. His most popular book is his most recent, If God Invented Baseball. The combination of its success and the Nationals’ World Series win last season has spurred him to consider offering a public reading near the baseball stadium this summer.
Named to the D.C. Hall of Fame in 2015, Miller was asked, after the Nationals’ win last fall, to pen an editorial in The Washington Post. Miller, always a booster for poetry, music, baseball, and D.C., wrote: “When the Washington Nationals won the World Series last week, they showed everyone how victory can be won with an international cast of players, a band of brothers dancing away a city’s blues and failures. D.C. is first, no longer last. After the series, we demand statehood.”
D.C. so loves Miller that his face is on murals in the Howard University bookstore and Busboys & Poets downtown. His poems ring a bench in Dupont Circle, annotate a sculpture in a Metro station, and grace the wall of La Casa Shelter. Since he doesn’t drive, Miller takes buses and the subway through his city constantly, eavesdropping on conversations that sometimes make it into poems, watching out the windows for images, taking in the city that he loves.
But this D.C. man was born in the Bronx. His family lived on Longwood Avenue, then the experimental St. Mary’s Housing Project. He learned to love reading early from his middle school teacher Mr. Snyder, played baseball in empty lots and on the street, and went to Christopher Columbus High School. A black physics teacher there went to Howard University, and that’s how Miller learned about the college. And though he’s lived in D.C. since 1968, Miller’s New York accent occasionally creeps back in, especially on “talk” or “because.”
His father emigrated from Panama and met Miller’s mother, also an immigrant from the West Indies, when they were dancing at the Savoy in Harlem. Miller remembers how kind Gwendolyn Brooks and Terry MacMillan were at parties to his mother, who was a seamstress and unused to society. He remembers finding his father’s Bible, after he died, decorated with notations. It was the only book his father read.
Miller wrote his first poems on the backs of envelopes home from Howard to his friends, mother, sister, and brother. He never wrote to his father.
Miller has published a dozen books of poetry, two memoirs, and reams of articles and essays. He edited the seminal In Search of Color Everywhere, a 1994 anthology of African-American poetry that won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. He has taught poetry to children, adults, veterans, and prison inmates. The world hears him through his weekly WPFW radio show and podcast “On the Margin,” and his television interview show, “The Scholars”, with guests such as Lonnie Bunch of the Smithsonian, filmed at the University of the District of Columbia.
In 2007, Miller donated 130 linear feet of his accumulated literary treasures to George Washington University library. At the archive, which is kept updated, are housed nearly fifty years’ worth of journals, works in progress, buttons, T-shirts, drafts of poems, and files on hundreds of poets, organized alphabetically by author, filled with letters, papers, books, and articles on different authors and D.C. figures, from Eric John Abraham to Ahmos Zu-Bolton. And you know you’ve made it in the poetry world when you’re given an E-Box, designed by Miller’s wife Denise, and filled with books and articles chosen by Miller from his own shelves, but based on the recipient’s interests. He often gives books to people whom he has taught in prison, when they are released and need books. Miller darts to the living room to point out his organized but overflowing shelves – “this whole house is a library," he laughs – and sweeps his hand over books that he’s reading now, the ones he needs to review, and then the signed copies that he’s bequeathing to his children.
But he occasionally laments that he has many acquaintances, and few true friends. In his memoir, Fathering Words, he wrote, “I grew for many years quietly in the shade like a vine reaching for daylight. In many ways I created myself. I learned from my father and brother the many ways to disguise sadness and loneliness.” His poems spark with that sadness, as well as desire, humor, witness, music, and, of course, baseball.
Miller won the AWP 2016 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature and the 2016 D.C. Mayor’s Arts Award for Distinguished Honor. The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller, published in 2016 by Willow Books, and If God Invented Baseball, published in 2018 by City Point Press, are his most recent books.__________
Susan Thornton Hobby: Tell me about arriving at Howard University in 1968, what kind of atmosphere was that and how did it make you a poet?
E. Ethelbert Miller: I think it’s important to talk about before I came to Howard. When I graduated from Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, I was 17 years old and I took a job at Bookazine in Greenwich Village. They also had a bookstore in Harlem called the National Memorial Bookstore, that was the bookstore that Malcolm X was always speaking in front of. That would be very important for me. But the major influences would be some individuals who owned Drum and Spear bookstore in D.C. and came to New York. When I told them I was coming to Howard, they said to look them up. Years later, I found out they were key members of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee): I got a chance to meet Charlie Cobb, I got a chance to meet Courtland Cox. As an African-American studies graduate, I found out how important these people were to the movement. When I came to Howard University – that’s 1968 -- Howard would have major student protests, and it’s very important to look at that protest in light of other student movements. Everybody talks about Berkeley and Columbia University, but Howard was very successful in terms of students getting all their demands met. No property damage. The creation of the African-American Studies program came out of that protest. That was key. …
I’m grateful for coming to Howard, because I had two professors in my freshman year, Bill Thomas and Jennifer Jordan, and that was my introduction to African-American literature. Bill encouraged me as a creative writer. When you have teachers like that, it changes your life. … I started writing back home, poems on the backs of envelopes, that was my start. My first poems appeared in The Hilltop, the Howard University newspaper. … Then Stephen Henderson came to Howard in the 1970s with this whole group of black intellectuals. He was one of the major critics because it was him and a few others who were trying to define what was called the black aesthetic. So people talk about Black Power, people talk about Black Arts. How do you know a poem is black? How do you know, structurally? He was raising these theoretical questions that today we still have not answered. Henderson gave rise to talking about the blues aesthetic, because the blues has a structure and form.
This is why in 2020 you could have a Cave Canem class teaching the blues, because it’s a structure. You can also see with people like Eugene Redmond, Terrance Hayes, creating new poetic structures. Well that goes back to the black aesthetic. They may not know that because maybe they weren’t born, but this whole search for forms was also part of the cultural wars. How do we defend black culture? I got introduced to Don Lee, who was kind of like a mentor to me, he would read my poems, and I would teach a class that he couldn’t make. And the last writer I want to mention from Howard in the early ’70s was Leon Damas, one of the major figures of the Negritude movement, along with [Léopold] Senghor and [Aimée] Césaire. I went to a board meeting, and they were all sitting around the table and introducing themselves, Dr. So and So of this, Dr. So and So of that. And then they came to Damas. And he was sitting like this [Miller settles back, crosses his legs, and becomes, for just a moment, serene]. And he just says, “Damas.” No title, nothing. He’s like Kobe or Beyoncé. [Miller laughs] He just said ‘Damas.’ And that’s the type of poet I wanted to be.
STH: You wrote about the difference between your life and your father’s, “I was embracing words while he was confined to silence.”
EEM:My father was born in Panama, both sides of my family were from the West Indies. And if you talk to people who have West Indian fathers, there is a silence. My father took care of my family. I tell people that I have never worked a day as hard as my father.
My father came to only one reading I ever did. It was in the old library in Chinatown, because that was close to the house where my mother and father lived. It was an old library, you had to go up steps to get there, and he wasn’t feeling well. I sat him next to my friend Linda Scott. She told me, “He said, ‘Didn’t my son give a nice sermon today?’ ” … [After the reading] I gave him my case – I was going out with friends. And when I got back to the house, I asked, ‘where’s my case?’ And he said, ‘it’s around here somewhere.’ That had my money in it, my pay from the reading. There was no way I could tell my father how much I got, out of respect, because if I told him what my honorarium was for 20 minutes of poetry? It was also me realizing, I was able to do this because my father made sacrifices for me, my brother, my sister. ...
STH: Howard University professor Arthur P. Davis wrote, “E. Ethelbert Miller has done more than any other person I know to help young writers improve their work and gain recognition.” You’ve become a literary activist, could you explain that role?
EEM:I’ve always tried, not only promoting writers, but documenting everything, and then making sure people are not written out of history. I did an interview with Hettie Cohen [a writer of children’s books about American singers like Bessie Smith]. She was married to LeRoi Jones [who became Amiri Baraka]. As we were talking on the radio, I knew her interest in music, … so I asked her about [Baraka’s] Blues People, and she said, ‘Well, I typed that manuscript up.’ She was almost like saying ‘I wrote some of it’ in a very subtle way. Once you begin to read correspondence, to look at the relationship between some of the men and women writers, that is key. Especially now that a new generation is rediscovering June Jordan. June Jordan has become like Audre Lorde, and some of those other writers. Now that people are doing their research, I get called up to New York to some of those conferences because you cannot study June Jordan’s work without studying my work.There is a poem that I wrote – wait, so Joy Harjo is the Poet Laureate today -- and Joy quotes a poem in the beginning of, … let me see [and here, Miller dashes upstairs to fetch a thick notebook of letters written between Miller and June Jordan, letters that are archived at University of Minnesota. On the way down the stairs, he begins talking again] she posts this poem at the beginning of her book. That poem is June Jordan writing to me when we’re breaking up. I wrote this poem called “Grand Army Plaza” and then June [he disappears to search another shelf and returns with Harjo’s book and explains that June wrote a poem back, dedicated to him, with the same title] … here, page 9, what Joy quotes from June’s poem is ‘we are not survivors of a civil war./ We survive our love/ because we go on/ loving.’ … When I came out of June Jordan’s apartment, I was taking the subway, I tie our break-up into the Civil War. What happens is June, she was responding to my poem. I talk about how I feel like a soldier going off to fight a civil war, and she takes that poem and that concept of civil war and builds on it. … I just know that certain people are not given the credit that they should get, like Hettie. Being a literary activist, you try to make sure that you have documents that can correct things. I collect things like a little time capsule that the scholars will come along and they will need this. I’m glad, for example, that I saved everything I got from Essex Hemphill [a poet from D.C. who died in 1995]. Because if you’re a black, gay man, Essex Hemphill is like Audre Lorde to you. … I would not be here if it was not for Sterling Brown, June Jordan, and sometimes when people become well-known, they forget that. ‘I just put these poems on the stove and heat them up. I didn’t go shopping!’ That’s what I try to do, to bring a certain honesty. I have these moments: What type of writer do I want to be as an elder?
There is a poem that I wrote–wait, so Joy Harjo is the Poet Laureate today--and Joy quotes a poem in the beginning of, … let me see [and here, Miller dashes upstairs to fetch a thick notebook of letters written between Miller and June Jordan, letters that are archived at University of Minnesota. On the way down the stairs, he begins talking again] she posts this poem at the beginning of her book. That poem is June Jordan writing to me when we’re breaking up. I wrote this poem called “Grand Army Plaza” and then June [he disappears to search another shelf and returns with Harjo’s book and explains that June wrote a poem back, dedicated to him, with the same title] … here, page 9, what Joy quotes from June’s poem is ‘we are not survivors of a civil war./ We survive our love/ because we go on/ loving.’ … There is a poem that I wrote – wait, so Joy Harjo is the Poet Laureate today -- and Joy quotes a poem in the beginning of, … let me see [and here, Miller dashes upstairs to fetch a thick notebook of letters written between Miller and June Jordan, letters that are archived at University of Minnesota. On the way down the stairs, he begins talking again] she posts this poem at the beginning of her book. That poem is June Jordan writing to me when we’re breaking up. I wrote this poem called “Grand Army Plaza” and then June [he disappears to search another shelf and returns with Harjo’s book and explains that June wrote a poem back, dedicated to him, with the same title] … here, page 9, what Joy quotes from June’s poem is ‘we are not survivors of a civil war./ We survive our love/ because we go on/ loving.’ …
When I came out of June Jordan’s apartment, I was taking the subway, I tie our break-up into the Civil War. What happens is June, she was responding to my poem. I talk about how I feel like a soldier going off to fight a civil war, and she takes that poem and that concept of civil war and builds on it. … I just know that certain people are not given the credit that they should get, like Hettie. Being a literary activist, you try to make sure that you have documents that can correct things. I collect things like a little time capsule that the scholars will come along and they will need this. I’m glad, for example, that I saved everything I got from Essex Hemphill [a poet from D.C. who died in 1995]. Because if you’re a black, gay man, Essex Hemphill is like Audre Lorde to you. … I would not be here if it was not for Sterling Brown, June Jordan, and sometimes when people become well-known, they forget that. ‘I just put these poems on the stove and heat them up. I didn’t go shopping!’
That’s what I try to do, to bring a certain honesty. I have these moments: What type of writer do I want to be as an elder?
STH:Lots of your poems are about love and desire, could you talk about those kinds of poems?
EEM: I think a lot of my poems are desire. They’ve been inspired by specific women. Some of those women I’ve had relationships with, some I’ve not had relationships with. … Sometimes I’m writing a letter to a person, then I take it into a poem. … Early in my work, I would use a persona, I was writing in the voice of women. Neruda is definitely an influence. I like some of the love poems that have been translated into Spanish. … I wanted to carve out this niche for love poems.
But this is 2020. If I die today, I’m known for my baseball poems. If God Invented Baseball is my best book in terms of the marketing of it. That’s because of David Wilk, I knew David Wilk when he was running the literature division of the NEA. He formed a company [City Point Press, which published Miller’s book]. Now the book is being distributed by Simon & Schuster. I’m writing that book and the Nationals win the World Series. When you look up, The Washington Post asks me for an editorial. People started buying it in bulk: ‘I coach a Little League team.’ [He laughs.] But the love poems are poems of desire, or they’re blues poems.
STH:You wrote about your travels in your writing, especially in Where are the Love Poems for Dictators?. What can leaving your country do for a poet?
EEM:The first travel that was very important was that l Ieft Howard University and was living in Mt. Pleasant in Adams Morgan. I had friends from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile. All of a sudden I was pulled into readings at All Souls Church. I became very involved with the Institute for Policy Studies [a progressive think tank] and then met Ariel Dorfman. Ariel just opened the door. He has that stature. … I met the cultural attaché at the Nicaraguan Embassy, organizing trips to Nicaragua. I was able to go to Nicaragua. Traveling to the Middle East, going to Israel, going to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen, gave me a really good sense of that area. Going to Tanzania would result in my meeting President Nyerere, and that’s why my son is Nyere.
The travel affects you in terms of the things you don’t forget. My first trip outside the U.S. was the U.S.S.R. and that was mind-boggling. It was a superpower but a very poor country. … You realize how poor it is. … Travel breaks down all the stereotypes. Here’s what it does, not for your poetry, but for you as a human being. This is why a guy who’s a jazz musician or a soldier in World War II wouldn’t want to come back. ‘Am I going to give this up and go back to Mississippi? Hell no!’ You’re a black person and you’re in a small town and nobody stares at you. You can go anywhere and there’s an openness, an embracing. I don’t feel that if I go from here to Wyoming. …
[Miller took a trip to the border between the U.S. and Mexico in January, and has written poems about the experience, one of which is printed in this issue.] Culture is key. That’s the type of writer I want to be. Nicaraguan writers are revolutionaries. When I’ve gone and looked at the situations in El Paso and Mexico, it’s after I’ve been looking at the situation in Guatemala. People from Guatemala, they’re Indigenous people. They’re just victims of the cartels. You get somebody who doesn’t speak English, who doesn’t speak Spanish, who speaks an Indigenous language. It’s so complicated. But you can see they’re people of the land. There’s a certain innocence. There’s a sense of community. You don’t want to lose that.
STH: You’ve gone into prisons and taught. What do you get out of that?
EEM:It’s not a matter of what you get out of it. If you are a writer of service, and this goes back to how I was raised, it goes back to why my brother decided to become a Trappist monk, we come out of that. If I’m reading about Nicaragua, if I’m reading about El Salvador, if I’m reading about Chile, I’m also reading about literature and theology. These are the things that motivate you as a good human being.
You combine that with me becoming an elder, yeah, you’re supposed to be there. … When I interact with people who are incarcerated, I’m learning a lot about my community. I was doing a workshop, and I asked a brother, ‘What time is it?’ He thought that was the most hilarious thing. ‘I’ve got eight to ten, I’m doing time.’ A small thing like that makes you aware. … When I look at prisons, senior citizen homes, those have been the new audience, where before I might have gone into an elementary school.
STH:What happened when Howard discontinued your job?
EEM: My life changes in 2015, when I get dismissed from Howard University. When I look back at it, it was the best thing to happen to me. I made the transition because two people – anonymously -- gave me some money. I could at least have money coming in until other sources of income came in. That told me, you never know who’s looking at you. … [The job loss allowed him to work on his Collected Poems with editor Kirsten Porter, and start the E-Group, a collection of people from all different professions, who come together in a sort of salon, reading a work and talking about it.] …
The E-Group is sort of like the Avengers, in which everyone has a specific superpower. Almost every week, I would meet a new writer, or I would mentor some for years. ‘What would happen if I brought these people together?’ I thought about it like Duke Ellington and his big band. People who I meet, I can pick people to come together, how their personalities are going to gel, what their expertise is. … We don’t get together very often, but it adds a whole other dimension when these people began to hook up. With twenty-five people, at any given time, maybe eight might show up. We meet three times a year, maybe, and the key thing is that people are staying in touch with each other. … At Howard, I used to have an Emerson quote, “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” one individual. I could be an institute. … I realized, especially after I left, that’s because I was there, there’s no reason I can’t produce that on a better level – where things work.
The early E-Group meetings, we came together to talk about what we were doing, but if I found a good article, like in The Atlantic or something like that, or it was about a text. This next month, we’ll come together and my friend Michelle Simms-Burton, she’s a Toni Morrison expert, we’ll discuss [Morrison’s] book of essays. It’s really taken off. Between the E-Group, my TV show, my radio show, and now I’m reviewing a book a month, I’m doing public programs with IPPH [Institute of Politics Policy and History] -- what I’m doing is from Marshall McLuhan, I still have to maintain the print, but I’m also in radio and television now.
STH: Tell me about donating your archives and giving away E-Boxes.
EEM: The E-Boxes are part of the journey I’m on. You want to make sure you have a different approach to material things at a certain point in your life. That letting go. Some would say I’m decluttering, but for me, it’s part of the path. When I meet new, young writers, I want to know the path that they’re on. I meet some young writers that all they want to do is make money, they want to be on Oprah. Terry MacMillan opened the door – they say, I want to have that kind of money. I don’t write a poem to be on Oprah.
STH: How has the poetry world changed?
EEM:In spoken word, how do we know a poem is good? It’s like Facebook, if people like it, it’s supposed to be good. That’s not right. What we’ve moved away from is critics – nobody wants to be a critic, because a critic is one person. ‘Why do you have a pen and nobody else around the table has a pen. What gives you the right?’ That’s why we have Donald Trump as a president. There’s no criteria. No one is going to say you’re not qualified. …
Take Cave Canem, where are the critics? In the Black Arts Movement, when that came through, we had Baraka, Haki [Madhubuti], Larry Neal, Lance Jeffers, they were writing poetry but they were also writing critical essays. … There are so many writers that need to produce essays. We need to be consistently analyzing literature. Where are the long essays on Yusef Komunyakaa? I think there might be some people from Germany doing something on Rita Dove. But we’re talking something like a full-length book. Many of the African-American scholars have focused on the novel more than poetry. Joanne Braxton put out a new work on [Paul Laurence] Dunbar. But where’s the full-length critical work that will lead to the biography?
The challenge now as writers is that we have to make sure that we reclaim certain words, that we drive the narrative. You can only have a new narrative if you start to introduce new words. [He runs upstairs to grab a small composition notebook filled with his handwriting.] These are words I come up with: moral imagination, contaminated moral environment, race porn, recycled racism, word embrace, digital bunkers, cultural pilgrims, deep-dish conversations, two-sided dumb, race cheese. It’s imagination. I keep this because sometimes I’m putting things together, I’m processing, I’m coming up with new words. … We have to make sure as writers that we’re clear about the definitions that are being circulated. We have to make sure the language is protected.
Interviewing E. Ethelbert Miller is like trying to keep track of everyone’s names at a crowded cocktail party after downing a couple of glasses of something potent.
Miller’s fifty-year immersion in the poetry world means that he befriended and interviewed people like Sterling Brown and Amiri Baraka (and does spot-on imitations of them) and gave a boost to writers such as Elizabeth Alexander, Ta Nehisi Coates, Charles Johnson, Dwayne Betts, and Cornelius Eady. Faster than one can jot them on a soggy napkin, Miller throws out names and titles and conferences and institutions and acronyms, punctuated with his trademark giggles.
The gossip is juicy–who hooked up with whom at the AWP Conference, which Howard University professor called which other professor a profanity that rhymes with other-clucker to his face, what the hitchhiking poet was wearing when he started the reading that Miller organized for him in the 1970s. The poet read while he was stripping off his militant jacket, his tie-dye shirt, finally “he’s standing up there buck naked,” Miller recalls, cackling the whole time he’s telling the story.
Along with being a fantastic storyteller, Miller is a literary activist as much as a poet. He networks, pens letters of introduction and recommendation, writes critical essays, lobbies to get writers on postage stamps (Maya Angelou on a stamp from Ghana, for instance), edits anthologies, attends conferences, and writes reviews for the New York Journal of Books. He founded and directed the Ascension Poetry Series, the longest-running D.C. poetry reading series. For decades, he co-edited Poet Lore, the nation’s oldest poetry magazine.
Often called D.C.’s dean of poets, Miller answers the door of his D.C. rowhouse in purple-framed glasses and a purple hoodie emblazoned with Gonzaga Basketball, where his son (now an award-winning coach) flourished on their team.
After turning off the jazz playing on the speaker in the kitchen, Miller settles himself at his dining room table, and gently scolds his rescue Siamese, Eden, purring around his legs. Family pictures crowd the top of the piano, papers and books are stacked on the table, and a chandelier hangs over a fading Valentine’s bouquet.
With a career that stretches from the Black Arts Movement to today’s Cave Canem and Dark Room Collective, Miller has been writing poems and talking up poets for fifty-two years.
But his longest tenure was as the director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University, a position he held for forty years that was terminated in 2015 without warning. His dismissal prompted letters of protest and support from people like Alexander, who told The Washington Post, “To me, it’s a sad day for Howard to lose Ethelbert Miller. Generations of writers – myself included – have made the trek to see him as budding young creative people committed to the art of the African diaspora. His generosity is legion.”
Generous, certainly. But not tolerant of insult or ignorance. Miller doesn’t do many readings nowadays – too much snapping after poems, most people haven’t read his work, and he does not do spoken word, he explains unapologetically. His most popular book is his most recent, If God Invented Baseball. The combination of its success and the Nationals’ World Series win last season has spurred him to consider offering a public reading near the baseball stadium this summer.
Named to the D.C. Hall of Fame in 2015, Miller was asked, after the Nationals’ win last fall, to pen an editorial in The Washington Post. Miller, always a booster for poetry, music, baseball, and D.C., wrote: “When the Washington Nationals won the World Series last week, they showed everyone how victory can be won with an international cast of players, a band of brothers dancing away a city’s blues and failures. D.C. is first, no longer last. After the series, we demand statehood.”
D.C. so loves Miller that his face is on murals in the Howard University bookstore and Busboys & Poets downtown. His poems ring a bench in Dupont Circle, annotate a sculpture in a Metro station, and grace the wall of La Casa Shelter. Since he doesn’t drive, Miller takes buses and the subway through his city constantly, eavesdropping on conversations that sometimes make it into poems, watching out the windows for images, taking in the city that he loves.
But this D.C. man was born in the Bronx. His family lived on Longwood Avenue, then the experimental St. Mary’s Housing Project. He learned to love reading early from his middle school teacher Mr. Snyder, played baseball in empty lots and on the street, and went to Christopher Columbus High School. A black physics teacher there went to Howard University, and that’s how Miller learned about the college. And though he’s lived in D.C. since 1968, Miller’s New York accent occasionally creeps back in, especially on “talk” or “because.”
His father emigrated from Panama and met Miller’s mother, also an immigrant from the West Indies, when they were dancing at the Savoy in Harlem. Miller remembers how kind Gwendolyn Brooks and Terry MacMillan were at parties to his mother, who was a seamstress and unused to society. He remembers finding his father’s Bible, after he died, decorated with notations. It was the only book his father read.
Miller wrote his first poems on the backs of envelopes home from Howard to his friends, mother, sister, and brother. He never wrote to his father.
Miller has published a dozen books of poetry, two memoirs, and reams of articles and essays. He edited the seminal In Search of Color Everywhere, a 1994 anthology of African-American poetry that won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. He has taught poetry to children, adults, veterans, and prison inmates. The world hears him through his weekly WPFW radio show and podcast “On the Margin,” and his television interview show, “The Scholars”, with guests such as Lonnie Bunch of the Smithsonian, filmed at the University of the District of Columbia.
In 2007, Miller donated 130 linear feet of his accumulated literary treasures to George Washington University library. At the archive, which is kept updated, are housed nearly fifty years’ worth of journals, works in progress, buttons, T-shirts, drafts of poems, and files on hundreds of poets, organized alphabetically by author, filled with letters, papers, books, and articles on different authors and D.C. figures, from Eric John Abraham to Ahmos Zu-Bolton. And you know you’ve made it in the poetry world when you’re given an E-Box, designed by Miller’s wife Denise, and filled with books and articles chosen by Miller from his own shelves, but based on the recipient’s interests. He often gives books to people whom he has taught in prison, when they are released and need books. Miller darts to the living room to point out his organized but overflowing shelves – “this whole house is a library," he laughs – and sweeps his hand over books that he’s reading now, the ones he needs to review, and then the signed copies that he’s bequeathing to his children.
But he occasionally laments that he has many acquaintances, and few true friends. In his memoir, Fathering Words, he wrote, “I grew for many years quietly in the shade like a vine reaching for daylight. In many ways I created myself. I learned from my father and brother the many ways to disguise sadness and loneliness.” His poems spark with that sadness, as well as desire, humor, witness, music, and, of course, baseball.
Miller won the AWP 2016 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature and the 2016 D.C. Mayor’s Arts Award for Distinguished Honor. The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller, published in 2016 by Willow Books, and If God Invented Baseball, published in 2018 by City Point Press, are his most recent books.
Susan Thornton Hobby: Tell me about arriving at Howard University in 1968, what kind of atmosphere was that and how did it make you a poet?
E. Ethelbert Miller: I think it’s important to talk about before I came to Howard. When I graduated from Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, I was 17 years old and I took a job at Bookazine in Greenwich Village. They also had a bookstore in Harlem called the National Memorial Bookstore, that was the bookstore that Malcolm X was always speaking in front of. That would be very important for me. But the major influences would be some individuals who owned Drum and Spear bookstore in D.C. and came to New York. When I told them I was coming to Howard, they said to look them up. Years later, I found out they were key members of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee): I got a chance to meet Charlie Cobb, I got a chance to meet Courtland Cox. As an African-American studies graduate, I found out how important these people were to the movement. When I came to Howard University – that’s 1968 -- Howard would have major student protests, and it’s very important to look at that protest in light of other student movements. Everybody talks about Berkeley and Columbia University, but Howard was very successful in terms of students getting all their demands met. No property damage. The creation of the African-American Studies program came out of that protest. That was key. …
I’m grateful for coming to Howard, because I had two professors in my freshman year, Bill Thomas and Jennifer Jordan, and that was my introduction to African-American literature. Bill encouraged me as a creative writer. When you have teachers like that, it changes your life. … I started writing back home, poems on the backs of envelopes, that was my start. My first poems appeared in The Hilltop, the Howard University newspaper. … Then Stephen Henderson came to Howard in the 1970s with this whole group of black intellectuals. He was one of the major critics because it was him and a few others who were trying to define what was called the black aesthetic. So people talk about Black Power, people talk about Black Arts. How do you know a poem is black? How do you know, structurally? He was raising these theoretical questions that today we still have not answered. Henderson gave rise to talking about the blues aesthetic, because the blues has a structure and form.
This is why in 2020 you could have a Cave Canem class teaching the blues, because it’s a structure. You can also see with people like Eugene Redmond, Terrance Hayes, creating new poetic structures. Well that goes back to the black aesthetic. They may not know that because maybe they weren’t born, but this whole search for forms was also part of the cultural wars. How do we defend black culture? I got introduced to Don Lee, who was kind of like a mentor to me, he would read my poems, and I would teach a class that he couldn’t make. And the last writer I want to mention from Howard in the early ’70s was Leon Damas, one of the major figures of the Negritude movement, along with [Léopold] Senghor and [Aimée] Césaire. I went to a board meeting, and they were all sitting around the table and introducing themselves, Dr. So and So of this, Dr. So and So of that. And then they came to Damas. And he was sitting like this [Miller settles back, crosses his legs, and becomes, for just a moment, serene]. And he just says, “Damas.” No title, nothing. He’s like Kobe or Beyoncé. [Miller laughs] He just said ‘Damas.’ And that’s the type of poet I wanted to be.
STH: You wrote about the difference between your life and your father’s, “I was embracing words while he was confined to silence.”
EEM:My father was born in Panama, both sides of my family were from the West Indies. And if you talk to people who have West Indian fathers, there is a silence. My father took care of my family. I tell people that I have never worked a day as hard as my father.
My father came to only one reading I ever did. It was in the old library in Chinatown, because that was close to the house where my mother and father lived. It was an old library, you had to go up steps to get there, and he wasn’t feeling well. I sat him next to my friend Linda Scott. She told me, “He said, ‘Didn’t my son give a nice sermon today?’ ” … [After the reading] I gave him my case – I was going out with friends. And when I got back to the house, I asked, ‘where’s my case?’ And he said, ‘it’s around here somewhere.’ That had my money in it, my pay from the reading. There was no way I could tell my father how much I got, out of respect, because if I told him what my honorarium was for 20 minutes of poetry? It was also me realizing, I was able to do this because my father made sacrifices for me, my brother, my sister. ...
STH: Howard University professor Arthur P. Davis wrote, “E. Ethelbert Miller has done more than any other person I know to help young writers improve their work and gain recognition.” You’ve become a literary activist, could you explain that role?
EEM:I’ve always tried, not only promoting writers, but documenting everything, and then making sure people are not written out of history. I did an interview with Hettie Cohen [a writer of children’s books about American singers like Bessie Smith]. She was married to LeRoi Jones [who became Amiri Baraka]. As we were talking on the radio, I knew her interest in music, … so I asked her about [Baraka’s] Blues People, and she said, ‘Well, I typed that manuscript up.’ She was almost like saying ‘I wrote some of it’ in a very subtle way. Once you begin to read correspondence, to look at the relationship between some of the men and women writers, that is key. Especially now that a new generation is rediscovering June Jordan. June Jordan has become like Audre Lorde, and some of those other writers. Now that people are doing their research, I get called up to New York to some of those conferences because you cannot study June Jordan’s work without studying my work.There is a poem that I wrote – wait, so Joy Harjo is the Poet Laureate today -- and Joy quotes a poem in the beginning of, … let me see [and here, Miller dashes upstairs to fetch a thick notebook of letters written between Miller and June Jordan, letters that are archived at University of Minnesota. On the way down the stairs, he begins talking again] she posts this poem at the beginning of her book. That poem is June Jordan writing to me when we’re breaking up. I wrote this poem called “Grand Army Plaza” and then June [he disappears to search another shelf and returns with Harjo’s book and explains that June wrote a poem back, dedicated to him, with the same title] … here, page 9, what Joy quotes from June’s poem is ‘we are not survivors of a civil war./ We survive our love/ because we go on/ loving.’ … When I came out of June Jordan’s apartment, I was taking the subway, I tie our break-up into the Civil War. What happens is June, she was responding to my poem. I talk about how I feel like a soldier going off to fight a civil war, and she takes that poem and that concept of civil war and builds on it. … I just know that certain people are not given the credit that they should get, like Hettie. Being a literary activist, you try to make sure that you have documents that can correct things. I collect things like a little time capsule that the scholars will come along and they will need this. I’m glad, for example, that I saved everything I got from Essex Hemphill [a poet from D.C. who died in 1995]. Because if you’re a black, gay man, Essex Hemphill is like Audre Lorde to you. … I would not be here if it was not for Sterling Brown, June Jordan, and sometimes when people become well-known, they forget that. ‘I just put these poems on the stove and heat them up. I didn’t go shopping!’ That’s what I try to do, to bring a certain honesty. I have these moments: What type of writer do I want to be as an elder?
There is a poem that I wrote–wait, so Joy Harjo is the Poet Laureate today--and Joy quotes a poem in the beginning of, … let me see [and here, Miller dashes upstairs to fetch a thick notebook of letters written between Miller and June Jordan, letters that are archived at University of Minnesota. On the way down the stairs, he begins talking again] she posts this poem at the beginning of her book. That poem is June Jordan writing to me when we’re breaking up. I wrote this poem called “Grand Army Plaza” and then June [he disappears to search another shelf and returns with Harjo’s book and explains that June wrote a poem back, dedicated to him, with the same title] … here, page 9, what Joy quotes from June’s poem is ‘we are not survivors of a civil war./ We survive our love/ because we go on/ loving.’ … There is a poem that I wrote – wait, so Joy Harjo is the Poet Laureate today -- and Joy quotes a poem in the beginning of, … let me see [and here, Miller dashes upstairs to fetch a thick notebook of letters written between Miller and June Jordan, letters that are archived at University of Minnesota. On the way down the stairs, he begins talking again] she posts this poem at the beginning of her book. That poem is June Jordan writing to me when we’re breaking up. I wrote this poem called “Grand Army Plaza” and then June [he disappears to search another shelf and returns with Harjo’s book and explains that June wrote a poem back, dedicated to him, with the same title] … here, page 9, what Joy quotes from June’s poem is ‘we are not survivors of a civil war./ We survive our love/ because we go on/ loving.’ …
When I came out of June Jordan’s apartment, I was taking the subway, I tie our break-up into the Civil War. What happens is June, she was responding to my poem. I talk about how I feel like a soldier going off to fight a civil war, and she takes that poem and that concept of civil war and builds on it. … I just know that certain people are not given the credit that they should get, like Hettie. Being a literary activist, you try to make sure that you have documents that can correct things. I collect things like a little time capsule that the scholars will come along and they will need this. I’m glad, for example, that I saved everything I got from Essex Hemphill [a poet from D.C. who died in 1995]. Because if you’re a black, gay man, Essex Hemphill is like Audre Lorde to you. … I would not be here if it was not for Sterling Brown, June Jordan, and sometimes when people become well-known, they forget that. ‘I just put these poems on the stove and heat them up. I didn’t go shopping!’
That’s what I try to do, to bring a certain honesty. I have these moments: What type of writer do I want to be as an elder?
STH:Lots of your poems are about love and desire, could you talk about those kinds of poems?
EEM: I think a lot of my poems are desire. They’ve been inspired by specific women. Some of those women I’ve had relationships with, some I’ve not had relationships with. … Sometimes I’m writing a letter to a person, then I take it into a poem. … Early in my work, I would use a persona, I was writing in the voice of women. Neruda is definitely an influence. I like some of the love poems that have been translated into Spanish. … I wanted to carve out this niche for love poems.
But this is 2020. If I die today, I’m known for my baseball poems. If God Invented Baseball is my best book in terms of the marketing of it. That’s because of David Wilk, I knew David Wilk when he was running the literature division of the NEA. He formed a company [City Point Press, which published Miller’s book]. Now the book is being distributed by Simon & Schuster. I’m writing that book and the Nationals win the World Series. When you look up, The Washington Post asks me for an editorial. People started buying it in bulk: ‘I coach a Little League team.’ [He laughs.] But the love poems are poems of desire, or they’re blues poems.
STH:You wrote about your travels in your writing, especially in Where are the Love Poems for Dictators?. What can leaving your country do for a poet?
EEM:The first travel that was very important was that l Ieft Howard University and was living in Mt. Pleasant in Adams Morgan. I had friends from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile. All of a sudden I was pulled into readings at All Souls Church. I became very involved with the Institute for Policy Studies [a progressive think tank] and then met Ariel Dorfman. Ariel just opened the door. He has that stature. … I met the cultural attaché at the Nicaraguan Embassy, organizing trips to Nicaragua. I was able to go to Nicaragua. Traveling to the Middle East, going to Israel, going to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen, gave me a really good sense of that area. Going to Tanzania would result in my meeting President Nyerere, and that’s why my son is Nyere.
The travel affects you in terms of the things you don’t forget. My first trip outside the U.S. was the U.S.S.R. and that was mind-boggling. It was a superpower but a very poor country. … You realize how poor it is. … Travel breaks down all the stereotypes. Here’s what it does, not for your poetry, but for you as a human being. This is why a guy who’s a jazz musician or a soldier in World War II wouldn’t want to come back. ‘Am I going to give this up and go back to Mississippi? Hell no!’ You’re a black person and you’re in a small town and nobody stares at you. You can go anywhere and there’s an openness, an embracing. I don’t feel that if I go from here to Wyoming. …
[Miller took a trip to the border between the U.S. and Mexico in January, and has written poems about the experience, one of which is printed in this issue.] Culture is key. That’s the type of writer I want to be. Nicaraguan writers are revolutionaries. When I’ve gone and looked at the situations in El Paso and Mexico, it’s after I’ve been looking at the situation in Guatemala. People from Guatemala, they’re Indigenous people. They’re just victims of the cartels. You get somebody who doesn’t speak English, who doesn’t speak Spanish, who speaks an Indigenous language. It’s so complicated. But you can see they’re people of the land. There’s a certain innocence. There’s a sense of community. You don’t want to lose that.
STH: You’ve gone into prisons and taught. What do you get out of that?
EEM:It’s not a matter of what you get out of it. If you are a writer of service, and this goes back to how I was raised, it goes back to why my brother decided to become a Trappist monk, we come out of that. If I’m reading about Nicaragua, if I’m reading about El Salvador, if I’m reading about Chile, I’m also reading about literature and theology. These are the things that motivate you as a good human being.
You combine that with me becoming an elder, yeah, you’re supposed to be there. … When I interact with people who are incarcerated, I’m learning a lot about my community. I was doing a workshop, and I asked a brother, ‘What time is it?’ He thought that was the most hilarious thing. ‘I’ve got eight to ten, I’m doing time.’ A small thing like that makes you aware. … When I look at prisons, senior citizen homes, those have been the new audience, where before I might have gone into an elementary school.
STH:What happened when Howard discontinued your job?
EEM: My life changes in 2015, when I get dismissed from Howard University. When I look back at it, it was the best thing to happen to me. I made the transition because two people – anonymously -- gave me some money. I could at least have money coming in until other sources of income came in. That told me, you never know who’s looking at you. … [The job loss allowed him to work on his Collected Poems with editor Kirsten Porter, and start the E-Group, a collection of people from all different professions, who come together in a sort of salon, reading a work and talking about it.] …
The E-Group is sort of like the Avengers, in which everyone has a specific superpower. Almost every week, I would meet a new writer, or I would mentor some for years. ‘What would happen if I brought these people together?’ I thought about it like Duke Ellington and his big band. People who I meet, I can pick people to come together, how their personalities are going to gel, what their expertise is. … We don’t get together very often, but it adds a whole other dimension when these people began to hook up. With twenty-five people, at any given time, maybe eight might show up. We meet three times a year, maybe, and the key thing is that people are staying in touch with each other. … At Howard, I used to have an Emerson quote, “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” one individual. I could be an institute. … I realized, especially after I left, that’s because I was there, there’s no reason I can’t produce that on a better level – where things work.
The early E-Group meetings, we came together to talk about what we were doing, but if I found a good article, like in The Atlantic or something like that, or it was about a text. This next month, we’ll come together and my friend Michelle Simms-Burton, she’s a Toni Morrison expert, we’ll discuss [Morrison’s] book of essays. It’s really taken off. Between the E-Group, my TV show, my radio show, and now I’m reviewing a book a month, I’m doing public programs with IPPH [Institute of Politics Policy and History] -- what I’m doing is from Marshall McLuhan, I still have to maintain the print, but I’m also in radio and television now.
STH: Tell me about donating your archives and giving away E-Boxes.
EEM: The E-Boxes are part of the journey I’m on. You want to make sure you have a different approach to material things at a certain point in your life. That letting go. Some would say I’m decluttering, but for me, it’s part of the path. When I meet new, young writers, I want to know the path that they’re on. I meet some young writers that all they want to do is make money, they want to be on Oprah. Terry MacMillan opened the door – they say, I want to have that kind of money. I don’t write a poem to be on Oprah.
STH: How has the poetry world changed?
EEM:In spoken word, how do we know a poem is good? It’s like Facebook, if people like it, it’s supposed to be good. That’s not right. What we’ve moved away from is critics – nobody wants to be a critic, because a critic is one person. ‘Why do you have a pen and nobody else around the table has a pen. What gives you the right?’ That’s why we have Donald Trump as a president. There’s no criteria. No one is going to say you’re not qualified. …
Take Cave Canem, where are the critics? In the Black Arts Movement, when that came through, we had Baraka, Haki [Madhubuti], Larry Neal, Lance Jeffers, they were writing poetry but they were also writing critical essays. … There are so many writers that need to produce essays. We need to be consistently analyzing literature. Where are the long essays on Yusef Komunyakaa? I think there might be some people from Germany doing something on Rita Dove. But we’re talking something like a full-length book. Many of the African-American scholars have focused on the novel more than poetry. Joanne Braxton put out a new work on [Paul Laurence] Dunbar. But where’s the full-length critical work that will lead to the biography?
The challenge now as writers is that we have to make sure that we reclaim certain words, that we drive the narrative. You can only have a new narrative if you start to introduce new words. [He runs upstairs to grab a small composition notebook filled with his handwriting.] These are words I come up with: moral imagination, contaminated moral environment, race porn, recycled racism, word embrace, digital bunkers, cultural pilgrims, deep-dish conversations, two-sided dumb, race cheese. It’s imagination. I keep this because sometimes I’m putting things together, I’m processing, I’m coming up with new words. … We have to make sure as writers that we’re clear about the definitions that are being circulated. We have to make sure the language is protected.
