Miller, E(ugene) Ethelbert
MILLER, E(ugene) Ethelbert
Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 20 November 1950. Education: Howard University, Washington, D.C., 1968–72, B.A. in African American studies 1972. Family: Married Denise King in 1982, two children. Career: Since 1974 director, African American Resource Center, Howard University; visiting professor, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 1993. Jessie Ball Dupont Scholar, Emory & Henry College, 1996; scholar-in-residence, George Mason University, 2000. Since 1974 founder and organizer, Ascension poetry reading series, Washington, D.C. Awards: Washington, D.C. Mayor's Art award, 1982; Public Humanities award, Washington, D.C., Community Council, 1988; Washington, D.C., Arts Commission fellowship, 1989; Columbia Merit award, 1993; O.B. Hardison, Jr., Poetry prize, 1995; Stephen Henderson Poetry award, 1997. Honorary doctorate of literature, Emory & Henry College, 1996. Address: P.O. Box 441, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 20059, U.S.A.
Publications
Poetry
The Land of Smiles/Land of No Smiles. Privately printed, 1974.
Andromeda. N.p., Chiva, 1974.
Women Surviving Massacres and Men. Washington, D.C., Anemone Press, 1977.
The Migrant Worker. Washington, D.C., Washington Writers Publishing House, 1978.
Season of Hunger/Cry of Rain: Poems 1975–1980. Detroit, Lotus Press, 1982.
Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators? Washington, D.C., Open Hand, 1986.
First Light, New and Selected Poems. Baltimore, Black Classic Press, 1994.
Whispers, Secrets & Promises. Baltimore, Black Classic Press, 1998.
Other
Editor, with Ahmos Zu-Bolton, Synergy D.C. Anthology. Washington, D.C., Energy Black South Press, 1975.
Editor, In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African-American Poetry. New York, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1994.
Editor, Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer. New York, St. Martins Press, 2000.
*Manuscript Collection: Howard University, Washington, D.C.
Critical Studies: "A 60's Harvest: The Poetic Vision of E. Ethelbert Miller" by Priscilla Ramsey, in Freedomways (New York), 24, 1984; "The Aesthetic of E. Ethelbert Miller" in Warriors, Conjurers and Priests by Joyce Joyce, Chicago, Third World Press, 1994; "Letters: Wanda Coleman to E. Ethelbert Miller" by E. Thelbert Miller, in Callaloo, winter 1999.
E. Ethelbert Miller comments:
Question: How long has it been legal for African-Americans to write in the United States? I think about this question and conclude that writing is still a political decision for every African-American writer. I started writing poetry in the late 1960s. I felt that I had a responsibility at that time to create something useful for my community. As I look around at the present political climate, I realize that there is a need for writers to understand where the lines are being drawn. We must stand in solidarity with everyone who desires freedom and human rights. The older I become, the more aware I am of the clock ticking. The poems come slower now than when I was in my twenties. Somehow I feel that because I am a writer I am a better human being.
* * *In the poetry of E. Ethelbert Miller, the gentle wit, topicality, particularity of incident, simple language, and metaphoric references can belie a utilitarian poetry of relevant sociopolitical commentary. While he was a student at Howard University during the height of the black arts movement, Miller's poetry was already different from the assertive, declarative, and even strident writing that was not unusual at the time. He was, and is, his own poet.
Miller approaches, explores, and evaluates experiences and situations for providential meaning and significance, always with an openness, often letting the correlative suggest its subject matter. In Andromeda, his first collection, he is the young poet predictably concerned with values, introspection, and love. In The Migrant Worker he has moved from self to the world and what that world means to the communal self. Season of Hunger/Cry of Rain: Poems1975–1980 is much concerned with ethos; he "… will take the / journey back / sail / the / middle passage" ("Tomorrow"). It is in this volume that he introduces a series of wryly philosophical "BoWillie" poems, for example, "bo willie shirley me / we headin for maryland / me I'm in the front seat / shirley she mad and fussin / cause she always gotta sit / in the back / i put on a cracker accent / and call her a sassy colored gal / we argue back and forth / bo willie he don't pay us no mind / he thinks we kids / he wears a beard that makes / him look like jesus / and i think to myself / maybe that's why he don't say nothin" ("Intersections: Crossing the District Line"). The collection also exhibits characteristic Miller whimsy. To a girlfriend who complains that he wears jeans every place, he prophesies that when he is "dressed / up in a coffin," he will ask her to let him "take her / somewhere / she hasn't / been" ("Dressed Up").
Miller's most overtly emotional poetry, and the works in which he comes closest to anger, is found in Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators? With their conscience-arresting imagery, these poems are openly political, and although their locale is South and Central America, they are worldwide in their concerns: "its close to midnight / & america wonders why michael jackson / wears one glove / while in argentina jews are missing / & the coast of nicaragua / is surrounded by mines" ("Thriller"). He is concerned about the hungry everywhere who are told, "do not worry / about food / / the dead do not starve" ("There Is a Place Where the Sea Goes When It Is Tired") and about places where "one could always find bones / growing in the fields" (untitled). In another instance he perceives a psychosocial kinship of African Americans to a Latin American peasant girl who on her wall tapes pictures of blond movie stars next to one of Jesus. The collection is not wholly grim, however, and in one section his habitual bemusement is particularly evident. For instance, he has not neglected the mysteriousness of love: "it was afterwards / when we were in the shower / that she said / / 'you're gonna write a poem about this' / 'about what?' i asked" ("Another Love Affair/ Another Poem").
First Light perhaps best illustrates the autobiographical elements of the thinking, feeling, and experiences that inform Miller's artistry. The thematic range is inclusive, as varied as, say, baseball, family, religion, and jazz. One favorite theme is love. By adolescence love's spirituality had become a reality: "the day my mother / threw away my comic books / and encouraged me to read the bible / was the day i gave up being / a superhero and started to think / of miracles / / this is how i came to love you / like moses looking over his / shoulder before he left that / mountain." The possibilities for communal love, along with its latent benefits, are consistently a factor in his perceptions of the capabilities of humankind.
Miller's lines are conversational, vernacular, and pithy, as if they are quiet spurts of thought or fragments of little whispers. The stanzaic design of his poetry is dictated by content, and his meter is subtle, free, and nonpercussive. There is no formal aural rhyme. Miller has a noticeable talent for the conceit, and he is capable of stark imagery, as when in "No Tacos for the Shah" the speaker, a poor woman whose husband is missing, to keep "from giving herself to the men" lights a small candle for him and says, "i watch it burn / like the inside of my womb / a soft wax dripping from between / my legs / the fire gone so long / the smoke of my husband / rising / across the border." His poetry's thematic impact is often suspended until there is revelatory, pointed closure that can reverberate for the reader: in South America "when they ask me questions / about communism or the government / i smile & say / / pete rose / pete rose / / sometimes they laugh / sometimes i laugh / / we seldom / laugh together" ("Driver").
Because of his acuity of vision and thought, wit, technical subtlety, and artistic integrity, Miller has become known and respected for the authentic poet that he is. He is also known and respected for his work as an organizer and a catalyst of poetry events, an editor of collections, and a selfless promoter of established as well as fledgling poets.
—Theodore R. Hudson