Poems I Probably Won’t Write About My Stepfather
On Holding the Phone to Your Ear the Night Before You Die
So Your Half-Sister Can Read You a Poem
On Missing Your Last Breath Because I Had to Stop for Gas
Poem in Which My Mother Reminisces with the Funeral Director
About Meeting Him When He Was a Little Kid
How to Choose the Right Locally Sourced Wooden Urn
for a Former Forester
On First Walking into the Forbidden Sanctum of
Your Office, AKA, the Junk Room
On Reading Letters in Which You Pour Your Heart Out
to Your Estranged Boys
Poem in Which I Hide the Scissored Pictures of Sexy Women
from My Mother
On Boxing Up Your Boy Scout Badges and the Many Clippings
Extolling Achievements I Wish I’d Known About
On Finding a Heartbroken Letter from Your 2nd Wife
Your Two Youngest Boys Were Gorgeous Toddlers
and I’m Sad for All of Us
Thinking About Who Might Want Your Guns
What to Do with All the Cowboy Hats
On Shipping You to Your Children by First Class Mail
Wondering Why You Never Let My Mother
Drive Your Pickup Truck
So Your Half-Sister Can Read You a Poem
On Missing Your Last Breath Because I Had to Stop for Gas
Poem in Which My Mother Reminisces with the Funeral Director
About Meeting Him When He Was a Little Kid
How to Choose the Right Locally Sourced Wooden Urn
for a Former Forester
On First Walking into the Forbidden Sanctum of
Your Office, AKA, the Junk Room
On Reading Letters in Which You Pour Your Heart Out
to Your Estranged Boys
Poem in Which I Hide the Scissored Pictures of Sexy Women
from My Mother
On Boxing Up Your Boy Scout Badges and the Many Clippings
Extolling Achievements I Wish I’d Known About
On Finding a Heartbroken Letter from Your 2nd Wife
Your Two Youngest Boys Were Gorgeous Toddlers
and I’m Sad for All of Us
Thinking About Who Might Want Your Guns
What to Do with All the Cowboy Hats
On Shipping You to Your Children by First Class Mail
Wondering Why You Never Let My Mother
Drive Your Pickup Truck
1.Since you published with Crab Creek Review, how has your work grown or changed? What excites you now that maybe didn’t back then?
I published my first poem in 2015 and my poems in Crab Creek Review appeared in 2019, so I am relatively young in writer years and still growing—I wrote my first ghazal and zuihitsu this year. The pandemic and the political turmoil of the last several years have also made writing about contemporary events and issues feel more urgent, despite the risk that such poems might feel dated before too long.
What excites me these days is finding ways to escape my normal aesthetic and tap into a deeper strain of creativity. I used to wait for a poem to find me—now I go hunting for them. Though there are times when the results are awful, I am sometimes pleasantly surprised by poems I have written when I only have an hour and am not in the mood. As poet Elaine Sexton recently said to me, we need to be willful with our work. I once could not imagine how anyone could write a poem-a-day for weeks or a month. But in fact, it is strangely liberating to only set out to write a poem with a small “p,” as opposed to a POEM. Sitting down to write can be overwhelming—all that white space, all those ghosts of the great poems of others floating through your brain…. I am a fan of poem-a-day exercises now, and plan to try another round this April.
2. Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you’ve written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
In addition to the essential advice to read widely and make time for writing, the best advice I think I have ever received was from poet April Bernard shortly before I finished my MFA program—when she encouraged me and several other poets in our class, Cassie Pruyn and Emily Mohn-Slate, to join forces for purposes of regularly exchanging and critiquing each other’s work. This was life changing, and Thief would not exist without my writing family, which has since grown in various directions.
Submitting is a struggle for me. I labor over which journals to send to, which poems to send to particular journals…. and too often after I finally submit, I look back at what I sent and think, what were you thinking?? So, I may not be the best person to give advice. I do think that most good poems eventually find a home, if you persist. Aside from that, one thing that has helped me recently is to have a routine. During the first eight or nine months of the pandemic, too often I either did not feel that anything I wrote was worth submitting or else I would gather a few poems and write a cover letter but ultimately not hit the send button. At the beginning of 2021, I committed to Zoom meetings with my friend Marion Brown, and we meet as often as once a week. We report our submissions, talk about what we are working on and where we might send our work, and set goals. This regime has worked wonders—even if I am often racing to send a single submission minutes before our meeting is scheduled to begin.
3. What are you reading?
In the stack next to or on my bed:
I am a few pages away from finishing Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. I am astonished by how much information can now be recovered from a piece of worked stone, a tooth, a fragment of bone, a layer of ash—and by how much remains to be discovered.
For poetry, I am re-reading Reginald Dwayne Betts’ Felon, which my son gave me for Christmas. It is a powerful if painful book, and worth lingering over.
I follow Risa Denenberg’s The Poetry Cafe and its chapbook reviews, and am now reading Suzanne Simmon’s new chapbook In September They Draw Down the Lake, which is gorgeous.
For years, I have kept Robert Hass’s The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa on my bedside table. David Young’s Five T’ang Poets and David Hinton’s The Selected Poems of Tu Fu joined that book this year and together they have gotten me through many long nights during the pandemic.
I recently finished Shindler’s List. Having seen the movie and read widely about the Holocaust, I was nevertheless unprepared. The movie condenses years into a couple hours, whereas in the book the horror of course goes on year after year after year…. almost unbelievable, the crushing details. Earlier in the pandemic, I read Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, so there has been a bit of a WWI/WWII fascination going on with me, an ongoing thing. I find the many possibilities of individual lives and history utterly fascinating—and also ever more relevant and urgent, given the tumult of these last few years. Where are we going as individuals, country, planet? What will turn out to be the key events as our futures unfold?
Next up in fiction, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.
4. What are you working on?
One of my goals for this year is to finish a full-length version of my chapbook, The Strangers Burial Ground, which was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2020. It’s a collection of lyric, persona, and documentary poems relating to 17th-19th century gravestone inscriptions and birth and death records and such on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and focuses particularly on the experiences of women. The poems are mostly written, but I have been dragging my feet because I love this project so much. Every burial ground, every collection of vital statistics, is a treasure trove of stories. Also, the old handwritten records—sometimes available online now—are often beautiful in and of themselves and can tell you things that typed transcripts cannot.
I am also writing steadily towards a collection to follow Thief and am excited by how different some of the poems are. But I am trying to stay open to what this new book might be “about.
I published my first poem in 2015 and my poems in Crab Creek Review appeared in 2019, so I am relatively young in writer years and still growing—I wrote my first ghazal and zuihitsu this year. The pandemic and the political turmoil of the last several years have also made writing about contemporary events and issues feel more urgent, despite the risk that such poems might feel dated before too long.
What excites me these days is finding ways to escape my normal aesthetic and tap into a deeper strain of creativity. I used to wait for a poem to find me—now I go hunting for them. Though there are times when the results are awful, I am sometimes pleasantly surprised by poems I have written when I only have an hour and am not in the mood. As poet Elaine Sexton recently said to me, we need to be willful with our work. I once could not imagine how anyone could write a poem-a-day for weeks or a month. But in fact, it is strangely liberating to only set out to write a poem with a small “p,” as opposed to a POEM. Sitting down to write can be overwhelming—all that white space, all those ghosts of the great poems of others floating through your brain…. I am a fan of poem-a-day exercises now, and plan to try another round this April.
2. Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you’ve written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
In addition to the essential advice to read widely and make time for writing, the best advice I think I have ever received was from poet April Bernard shortly before I finished my MFA program—when she encouraged me and several other poets in our class, Cassie Pruyn and Emily Mohn-Slate, to join forces for purposes of regularly exchanging and critiquing each other’s work. This was life changing, and Thief would not exist without my writing family, which has since grown in various directions.
Submitting is a struggle for me. I labor over which journals to send to, which poems to send to particular journals…. and too often after I finally submit, I look back at what I sent and think, what were you thinking?? So, I may not be the best person to give advice. I do think that most good poems eventually find a home, if you persist. Aside from that, one thing that has helped me recently is to have a routine. During the first eight or nine months of the pandemic, too often I either did not feel that anything I wrote was worth submitting or else I would gather a few poems and write a cover letter but ultimately not hit the send button. At the beginning of 2021, I committed to Zoom meetings with my friend Marion Brown, and we meet as often as once a week. We report our submissions, talk about what we are working on and where we might send our work, and set goals. This regime has worked wonders—even if I am often racing to send a single submission minutes before our meeting is scheduled to begin.
3. What are you reading?
In the stack next to or on my bed:
I am a few pages away from finishing Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. I am astonished by how much information can now be recovered from a piece of worked stone, a tooth, a fragment of bone, a layer of ash—and by how much remains to be discovered.
For poetry, I am re-reading Reginald Dwayne Betts’ Felon, which my son gave me for Christmas. It is a powerful if painful book, and worth lingering over.
I follow Risa Denenberg’s The Poetry Cafe and its chapbook reviews, and am now reading Suzanne Simmon’s new chapbook In September They Draw Down the Lake, which is gorgeous.
For years, I have kept Robert Hass’s The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa on my bedside table. David Young’s Five T’ang Poets and David Hinton’s The Selected Poems of Tu Fu joined that book this year and together they have gotten me through many long nights during the pandemic.
I recently finished Shindler’s List. Having seen the movie and read widely about the Holocaust, I was nevertheless unprepared. The movie condenses years into a couple hours, whereas in the book the horror of course goes on year after year after year…. almost unbelievable, the crushing details. Earlier in the pandemic, I read Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, so there has been a bit of a WWI/WWII fascination going on with me, an ongoing thing. I find the many possibilities of individual lives and history utterly fascinating—and also ever more relevant and urgent, given the tumult of these last few years. Where are we going as individuals, country, planet? What will turn out to be the key events as our futures unfold?
Next up in fiction, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.
4. What are you working on?
One of my goals for this year is to finish a full-length version of my chapbook, The Strangers Burial Ground, which was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2020. It’s a collection of lyric, persona, and documentary poems relating to 17th-19th century gravestone inscriptions and birth and death records and such on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and focuses particularly on the experiences of women. The poems are mostly written, but I have been dragging my feet because I love this project so much. Every burial ground, every collection of vital statistics, is a treasure trove of stories. Also, the old handwritten records—sometimes available online now—are often beautiful in and of themselves and can tell you things that typed transcripts cannot.
I am also writing steadily towards a collection to follow Thief and am excited by how different some of the poems are. But I am trying to stay open to what this new book might be “about.
Jennifer Stewart Miller is the author of Thief (2021), winner of the 2020 Grayson Books Poetry Prize, A Fox Appears: A Biography of a Boy in Haiku (2015), and a chapbook, The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press 2020). Recent work has appeared in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, RHINO, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Bennington College and a JD from Columbia University. For more information, visit JenniferStewartMiller.com.