Ben Miller

from Make

SPREAD 17 (LEARN TO LIVE / WITH THE MIND YOU HAVE / LEARN TO LIVE)
SPREAD 18 (FORGET THE MELODY / REMEMBER THE HARMONY)
SPREAD 19 (THE DECAF COFFEE IS WORKING)
SPREAD 20 (STATUE HONORING / THE STANZA / YET TO BE WRITTEN)

SELECTED NOTES ON MAKE

While the preceding poetic territory relies on the insistent enigma of the writing process as a source of music, I offer these notes to readers interested in delving further into the minutiae of the text. Generally excluded are identifications of historical figures, place names, and other entities that might be located via obvious Internet keyword searches unless there is a detail to add not readily available to the public and which I deem of importance to understanding what is happening.

SPREAD 17 (LEARN TO LIVE WITH…)

FEAR OF VIOLENCE

A terror that has disrupted my relationship with America—and my family—since I was a child listening to a mother tell bedtime stories based on details of famous mass murders she had learned about from paperbacks carried in her huge purse.

the tide

For me, always, the tide is the gray-green current off Montauk, Long Island.

art that puts hair on my chest

Ref. to tiny snippets of paper found on my shirt during the composing of this poem.

COME BACK AFRICA

Ref. to the black-and-white film Come Back, Africa (1959) directed by Lionel Rogosin (1924-2000) and starring the mesmerizing Mariam Makeba (1932-2008); notable for its frank depiction of the Apartheid Era in South Africa.

have a good obey

Ref. to the once ubiquitous t-shirt (created by the artist Shephard Fairey: 1970-) featuring OBEY above an image of French wrestler Andre the Giant (1946-1993).

EMPTION

Emotion lacking full emotional content—a feeling preempted by inner obstacles.

SPREAD 18 (FORGET THE MELODY…)

gallows rope, good wood ruined, peeling sill paint, roach brother ETC

Stray details of the house I grew up in.

RRE

When a yard in an energetic city resembles an abandoned rural property.

THE TIMES GUT

Ref. to my father’s habit of tossing aside sections of the Sunday newspaper that collected around his recliner like the inky offal of a disemboweled continuum.

Whyam

Homage to the curious joy I always experience when reading the name Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), one of the founders of the art movement known as Vorticism.

SPREAD 19 (THE DECAF COFFEE…)

w b web

Ref. to prophetic lines spun by poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).

swan lake

My great grandfather, Frank Miller, an immigrant from Scotland and a mechanic for the Milwaukee Road rail line, built a cottage on this Wisconsin lake. The place was magic to me. It made me want to run outside instead of hide from a difficult world: cool sandy soil, wildflowers, green lake smell, the whip-poor-will calling from pines.

bow-tie kind

Ref. to the courtly next door neighbor Mr. Hickey who always let pre-teen me in when I knocked on his door upset about events at home or on the playground.

lonnie’s lessons

Tree-climbing 18-year-old red-haired son of the Baptist minister who moved in across the street when I was ten and taught me how to tie a fisherman’s knot.

RAGBRAI

Ref. to the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, a summer event sponsored by the state’s largest newspaper that I participated in after I sold my comic book collection to raise funds to purchase a 10-speed Fuji bicycle.

meeting anna

The pink-hat-wearing writer I met in September of 1986 at 19 University Place in New York City, and married on December 9, 1989, in downtown Brooklyn.

Big Nick Nicholas

Saxophone player George Walker Nicholas (1922-1997)—nickname “Deedle dum”—was famous for hosting after hours jams in the 1950s at Harlem’s Paradise Club. I heard him play at St . Peter’s church in Manhattan in the 1990s.

bologna cut in squares and fried

Childhood meal staple I irrationally found more palatable if cut into different shapes before being fried in margarine.

sister dead at 44

For decades my talented sister Marianna Rose Miller (1967-2011) struggled with alcoholism and the effects of sexual abuse that occurred when she was a child.

michael dead at 31

Michael Current (1961-1992), high school classmate and visionary political activist whose work was responsible for the introduction of a gay rights bill in the Iowa Legislature in the late 1980s; he died of a diabetic crisis in Des Moines, the capital.

jack dead at 19

Jack Seier (1964-1983), president of my high school class and songwriter I supplied with lyrics; he drowned in the Mississippi River.

GUTHRIE HOOKER TATUM

Ref. to three musicians who taught me more about history than any book: Woody Guthrie (1912-1967), John Lee Hooker (1917-2001), Art Tatum (1909-1956).

duck creek, mississippi river…

Bodies of water—Iowa to Paris—that have lectured to me on many subjects.

lawless lawyers

Ref. to my parents, attorneys presiding over a home where no laws existed.

SPREAD 20 (STATUE HONORING THE STANZA…)

22nc

The 22nd draft not cooperating either.

thq

Thanks expressed in a questioning tone to a lovely image that interrupts a text.

lawk

When one embarks on a harmless lark that ends up preying on them like a hawk.

don’t forget hair

As with the hair of a corpse, I find that a draft filed deep in a cabinet still continues to grow in a fashion, new lines occurring to me at odd intervals.

L.R.

Initials of the pianist and composer Leon Russell (1942-2016) whose 1971 album Stranger in a Strange Land is on my Top Ten Supernal Albums list.

Ben Miller’s writing has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, Best American Essays, Raritan, Salmagundi, AGNI, New England Review, Southern Review, Fiction International, and elsewhere. His awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Radcliffe Institute, as well as grants from the South Dakota Arts Council and the Schlesinger Library. He is the author of River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa.

Sarah J. Sloat

Being Busy
Disdain
Empty My Chest
Smoke
Spite
Voyeur

Sarah J. Sloat is the author of Hotel Almighty, a collection a visual poetry published in 2020 by Sarabande Books. Born in New Jersey, Sarah has lived for many years in Europe, where she works in news. Her poems, prose and collage have appeared in The Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Sixth Finch and elsewhere. You can keep up with her at sarahjsloat.com, on Twitter at @SJSloat and on Instagram at @sjane30.

Kristin LaFollette

The Accident (2017)
The Accident (2017)
like a cell of your skin (2019)
like a cell of your skin (2019)
Old Bones (2019)
Old Bones (2019)
Kristin LaFollette is a writer, artist, and photographer and is the author of the chapbook, Body Parts (GFT Press, 2018). She is a professor at the University of Southern Indiana and serves as the Art Editor at Mud Season Review. You can visit her on Twitter at @k_lafollette03 or on her website at kristinlafollette.com.

Rick Pieto

Glitch Poems

if my window
past blue arcs
scah 99
drop 3
The Glitch Poems are in the tradition of visual poetry. Each glitch poem contains, at its core, several traditional poems. These conventional poems are improperly mixed and conveyed with – some intentional, some random – visual symbols, numbers and letters. This inappropriate incorporation of visual and literary elements create a text that is poetic but also a site where noise and interference scramble the reliability of the traditional poetic text and its meanings. Furthermore each poem is printed numerous times creating surfaces that produce a density that denigrates the integrity and clarity of the stand-alone traditional poem. Each glitch poem – with its mixture of words, symbols and letters – creates a powerful graphic statement that at the same time hinders the typical act of reading by creating a seemingly illegible surface that sets up innumerable texts that appear as our eyes glance over the page combining words, phrases and graphic symbols into fortuitous new poems.
Rick Pieto is a visual poet and writer living in the Silver Spring, Maryland area. His visual poetry has been exhibited at Rhizome DC and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, and published in Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, fields, Midway Journal, 805: Lit + Art and Minetta Review. His poetry has been published in The Big Windows Review and Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. He received a PhD in media ecology from New York University and has taught at Georgetown University and the University of Baltimore.

hiromi suzuki

Eternal Relations

forest —–> 森 / Forest
river —–> 川 / River
rain —–> 雨 / Rain
umbrella —–> 傘 / Umbrella
town —–> 町 / Town
bird —–> 鳥 / Bird
people —–> 人 / People
tree —–> 木 / Tree
The Japanese language is comprised of Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana. Kanji are also Chinese characters, and the same Kanji may have different meanings, shapes, and pronunciations in Chinese and Japanese. In Eternal Relations, I use their Japanese versions. In a sense, Kanji are hieroglyphs. By using Kanji, we can draw every natural phenomenon and mental scene with one letter. It is itself visual poetry. In Japanese culture, the short poem known as haiku evokes nature and daily life. In the same way, by using kanji, I evoke the eternal loop between nature and time, their ‘eternal relations.’
hiromi suzuki is a poet and artist living in Tokyo, Japan. She is the author of Ms. cried, 77 poems by hiromi suzuki (kisaragi publishing, 2013), logbook (Hesterglock Press, 2018) and INVISIBLE SCENERY (Low Frequency Press, 2018). Her works are published internationally in Otoliths, BlazeVOX, Empty Mirror, Hotel, Burning House Press, DATABLEED, MOONCHILD MAGAZINE, talking about strawberries all of the time, Mookychick, Coldfront, RIC Journal, 3:AM Magazine, The Cerurove, A) GLIMPSE) OF), and so on.

Sonja Johanson

Gneiss

At least
reinvent
destiny
tatters
within geological strata
toss them into
a       billion
little
days
All of them

erasure, Anne Rice, Taltos, p.10
Pinnae segments from fertile fronds, Sensitive Fern, Onoclea sensibilis

Divinity

choose
to
fall into
quantum physics
tracing the path of particles
within
this
brimming world
this
empire                      of                      paper
zeal

erasure, Anne Rice, Taltos, p. 470
simple leaves, Pincushion Moss, Leucobryum glaucum

Bradbury

orange
black
mixed and ready,
dying in the air.
a discreet
cleft.
night,
came again,
dark and distinct,

erasure, Anne Rice, Taltos, p. 120
capsules and berries, Japanese Spindle and Privet, Euonymous japonica and Ligustrum compactum

This series of erasures use the Anne Rice novel Taltos as their source text. I elected to perform these erasures using plant materials as a way of celebrating and mourning our current ecological state; the breakneck speed of climate change and globalization is easily observed by those working in horticulture and conservation. These plants represent both native plants that are threatened by habitat loss and the non-natives that are replacing them. In selecting materials for these erasures, I looked for plants that were accessible in the New England landscape during the month of October, and sought diversity of form, texture, colour, and botanical structures.

Sonja Johanson has recent work appearing in THRUSH, Bellevue Literary Review, and American Life in Poetry. She is a contributing editor at the Eastern Iowa Review, and the author of Impossible Dovetail (IDES, Silver Birch Press), all those ragged scars (Choose the Sword Press), and Trees in Our Dooryards (Redbird Chapbooks). Sonja divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine. Follow her at sonjajohanson.net.