Abena Ntoso: Welcome to Backlit, a space for groundbreaking conversations with emerging authors. I'm your host, Abena Ntoso. In each episode, I converse with a contemporary writer and thinker whose work inspires deep and authentic conversation around social issues. Our discussion is not just about the book, or even just about the writer’s life and work; our discussion is a shared space where minds meet to be inspired by one another, explore issues together, and ultimately to generate new ideas and perspectives. 

Today’s thought partner is Wayne Miller, author of six poetry collections, most recently The End of Childhood and We the Jury. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Miller has also co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century. He lives in Denver, where he co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, and edits the literary journal Copper Nickel.

Wayne, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation today.

Wayne Miller: Thanks for having me, Abena. I’m grateful for your interest in my work.

Abena Ntoso: I wanted to start out with introducing The City, Our City, which is a collection published in 2011, but it resonates, continually, today, and when I picked it up, a lot of the themes, as we're thinking about, the development of cities and the development of civilization, a lot of these themes are timeless themes in that we see the echoes of them continuing to occur in society now. So I'd love to have you read the opening poem to the collection, before we get into it.

Wayne Miller (he/him): Great, thank you. This is called “A Prayer (O City—)”.

O arrow landed deep in Harold's eye—

O voice

             pressing upward against the sky—

O light and steam.

(When the western windows

of the City go pink, the rooms behind them

lock shut with clouds.)

O clouds— 

               (Slipping down in the morning

to part around the skyrises, to marble

the rooftop shanties and gardens,

the hammocks and clotheslines.)

And graying water tanks— 

                                        (Our water lifted

into the clouds—and me, drawing it

down into my cup, my breath

pressed to the shimmering surface.)

O City—

               (That breathes itself

into the glass—that pulls me to the window

I press my gaze through,

I press my face to—)

O City—

              (And the makers,

who drew the City through the membranes

of paper and canvas,

giving the city to the City—) 

                                               O City—

(And our tables and demitasses,

stereos and fire escapes,

our kisses in doorways, weapons

and sculptures, carnivals

and fistfights, sex toys and votives,

engines and metaphors—.) 

City of Joists—

(The City shot through with them.)

City of Doorways—

                            (The City opens us,

and we step through.)

O Light-Coming-on-in-a-Window—

(Since you've opened the fridge,

opened your book, opened your room

to the room next door.) 

O City—

                (Pushing through the dark

like the nose of a plane.)

O City—

                (It could be a bomber,

night-black, the instruments on auto,

the pilot asleep in his lounger.) 

O City—

              (In the hull below, words

are written on the bombs in Sharpie.) 

—

(There's also a folder of letters lying off to the side in the dark.

In one of them, the pilot's brother describes some fingerprints he's 

found pressed inside the lip of a broken jar. 

He's an archaeologist. The prints are from the jar's maker—just after the Battle of Hastings,

near the end of the eleventh century.)

Abena Ntoso: Thank you so much for that wonderful reading. So this opening poem is titled, “A Prayer (O City—)”, and it is both an invocation and an exaltation of the city and also a descriptive physical manifestation of it. So we have this inclination to worship the city as a transcendent entity, while also acknowledging that urban civilization is composed of objects, buildings, humans, relationships, conflicts, wars, artifacts. And so the poem connects history and modernity, and you do that throughout the collection.

Wayne Miller: Yes, definitely.

Abena Ntoso: So, I'm curious, what inspired you to embark on the journey of writing this particular collection with these connections that it's making between history and modernity?

Wayne Miller: Wow, that's, like, a really central question that's, like, going right to the heart of the book. The City, Our City is, I would say, my most, sort of, theoretically driven book. I mean, I didn't know this when I started writing the book, but pretty quickly it became clear that I was describing a place called The City. The City is always capitalized throughout the book, which would be a kind of amalgam of multiple cities, a kind of view of all cities taken collectively and imagined as a kind of entity within the larger world.

At the time that I wrote this book, I was living in Kansas City, Missouri, and teaching in a small town named Warrensburg, Missouri, at the University of Central Missouri, and I was commuting about 50 miles each way to work. So I was really living in two worlds. I was living in, you know, a mid-sized Midwestern city with an airport that connected me to all these other cities, with all of these, you know, cultural artifacts that the city collects. You know, Kansas City has an amazing art museum called the Nelson Atkins Gallery. There was a literary world there. There still is. There was an art world. You know, all of these, there was a massive commercial world, especially for a city its size, it, you know, it has, like, it's a kind of economic hub for a lot of the farming world around it. And then I was teaching at this little university out in this small town that felt really separated from Kansas City, and at the same time, the university town, Warrensburg, was right next to Whiteman Air Force Base. You know, I was writing these poems from about 2008 to 2010, 2007 to 2010. The Iraq War and the Afghan Wars, those were still going on.

Because we were right next to an Air Force base, a lot of my students were in the military, many of them were disappearing mid-semester, getting shipped out, and there was a lot going on in that world. The stealth bombers that get vaguely alluded to in this poem are housed at Whiteman Air Force Base, and in the early period of the Iraq War, they were flying sorties out of Missouri, going over and bombing Baghdad, then coming back. They were refueling over Spain, is my understanding, and then bombing and coming back. And it seemed to me that in this small town, you know, I was living in the city, I was commuting out to the country, but there were two outposts of the city, those were the Air Force Base and the University, which were the two places in this town that were connected to all these other, manifestations of history and culture and power, and a kind of internationalism that cities have today, to a kind of connection to all these other cities. 

And I just… I couldn't let go of that sort of growing observation as it was taking shape, that I was moving back and forth between, sort of, city and country, and that city as a seat of power, and seat of culture was also colonial. It was reaching out into the country, it was doing all of these things, and they were fairly inescapable. And so that thinking is what I was kind of working out as I was writing the book. 

At the same time, I also was a history major as an undergraduate in college. I love history, super fascinated by history to this day. My commute to work is always listening to history podcasts, so I was really quickly starting to think about places in which the city and the country were divided, because at the same time, you know, this is a part of just American culture now, but it wasn't so clear then that we were going to have this urban-rural political divide, you know, blue cities, red country, that kind of view, too. You know, I was thinking about that as well. I was thinking about the French Revolution, when the city essentially went out and conquered the country. The Spanish Civil War shows up a lot in this book, where the country essentially came in and took over the cities. That idea of, like urban-rural divide as a persistent historical phenomenon was something I was really thinking about. 

I'm very much a city person, I've lived my whole life in cities, I like living in cities. But I also had some real sympathy for my students, the people I met in town, the people who I felt like culture was increasingly forgetting, or ignoring. And so, I could understand their resentment of the city. I also knew lots of, you know, highly educated, liberal people in cities who just dismissed anything beyond the city, sort of categorically. That was frustrating to me. So, that's all the… I could keep going on about this, but that's, like, all of the thinking that kind of informed the book. 

And then the other thing is that I was reading a lot of Auden at the time. So this idea of, like, a poetry that was maybe not politically engaged, but sort of, like, socio-historically or socioculturally engaged. It was thinking about the moment we were living in, and not just the sort of more abstract subject matter of poetry, love, loss, those kinds of things. I'm trying to figure out how to get that into my work. This is, like, my first book that really thinks about more historical, more socio-historical context and concepts. So, that's all of the stuff, I think. 

Abena Ntoso: There were so many things that you mentioned that I had also been thinking about, and I love that you kind of went straight into this idea of the tension between the… the cities and the more rural areas.

As I think about the tension and the way it is showing up in the book, besides the tension in the sense of the ideas and content, there's also a tension in the images, in some of the surreal images. You've got this way of bringing that tension into the images and visuals that are in the poem.

And so it makes me think about an idea that I have seen come up a little more often, and I explore it in my own work as well, of what can happen when you bring two completely different concepts, or completely different ways of life, or a completely different, views together. What can happen besides, you know, the default of polarization, you know, or clashing, but there's also this potential for birthing of a third new idea, whether that comes through creativity, open-mindedness that would need to be present. Did you feel that kind of dynamic in your work at all as you were putting those two ideas in juxtaposition with each other? 

Wayne Miller: The urban and the rural?

Abena Ntoso: Yeah.

Wayne Miller: Yeah, I mean at a certain point as I was writing the book, you know, once I realized that I had this sort of through-line for the book, right, this idea of the city as an amalgam of cities, then I started to think about what were the things that would have to enter this? What needed to show up in this book? You know, I have one poem where there's a kind of italicized voice disparaging people from the country. I felt like that was… that was necessary to… to get that voice in there. 

So it wasn't so much a synthesis, but it was trying to figure out how to fill in the gaps. If I was gonna have this large view that was gonna inform the book consistently, then I needed to figure out what needed to be there, so there weren't massive blank spots, if that makes sense. So, you know, I mean, there's a poem that addresses racial violence, it has a kind of colonial feel, in terms of the history that's showing up in it. I felt like that was a gap in the book, and at a certain point, I had to write into the book with that. You know, I just had to think about, well, what have cities done? Both good and bad, you know? And that was so much of my thinking in the book. So it's not a synthesis, it was a filling out. 

I think that, like, the people I know who live in cities tend to think of cities as places of liberation. Like, think about all the… all the smart people, the queer people, the, you know, the people who grew up in a small town or someplace where they felt oppressed by the smallness of that place, and we're like, I need to arrive into a city where I can, you know, be myself, self-identify, find a like-minded community, find people who are like me in some way. And, you know, and that is all very much true, and very much a part of the history of cities. 

But it's not the whole truth of cities. Cities are also, you know, I mean, think about New York as a center of the arts. Why is that? Because it's a center of money. And I think that it's very easy for us to try to, like, separate these things from each other so that we can identify with the things we like and kind of ignore the things we don't like. And I think a lot of this book was me trying to come to grips with the city being all of these things that I like, and all of these things that I don't like. And that, ultimately, that wasn't gonna discourage me from being someone who wanted to live in cities, wanted to identify with cities, believes in all these things I love about cities. But I also want to be clear-eyed about it, you know? I don't want to think that cities are, you know, are devoid of all of these problems, and all of these things that I think, myself included, that the American left is sort of horrified by, you know? If you really hate colonialism, go live in rural America. That's a place that is truly not colonial. You know, don't celebrate New York City, because it is a place that has been culturally hegemonic, and don't love Europe because it's the center of colonialism. I wanted to see the whole picture, and I wanted to come to grips myself with what… as much as I could, I mean, there's never a complete picture, and this book is not long enough for it to truly be a whole picture, but, like, to make space for the critiques of the city that I think are right and fair, even if they make me feel defensive as someone who loves cities.

Abena Ntoso: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. It is a way of acknowledging, I think, as you mentioned, you know, the things that we don't like to identify with or think about that are very much a part of the fabric of these cities that, like you said, we tend to exalt, but there's history there that is, that hasn't been, what we would necessarily want to, embrace.

And… and it makes me think also of, you know, our work in the literary arts. I sometimes see the same kind of thing when it comes to celebrating our work, as… as writers and, and thinkers. We tend to have a relationship to literature that is very romantic sometimes.

Wayne Miller: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Abena Ntoso: But there is so much, kind of, closing doors, to other, other views, other ways of life, that is… that is almost in the fabric, right? You know, when you speak of New York City and, you know, money being in the fabric, right? This idea of, we look at things a certain way, is, is in the fabric.

So there were actually a couple of poems that feature books and literature in the poems, and it's done really beautifully. I'm thinking in particular of “American Nocturne,” “Nothing in the Letters,” “An Elegy,” and “The Found Poem in the Barracks.” So, I'd love to have you read one of those, maybe, and then I have a follow-up question for you related to that.

Wayne Miller: Sure, can I read "In the Barracks"?

Abena Ntoso: Yes, absolutely!

Wayne Miller: And I call this a found poem, because it is legitimately a found poem. As I was, I mean, I did a lot of research for this book, just reading, sort of, all sorts of different texts about cities, about these places that I identified before that I think of as moments of, like, clear historical conflict between, sort of, quote-unquote city and country. And one was this essay by a guy named Bernard Knox about his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was a group of Americans who went over and went to go fight on the side of the Republicans, the left, against the fascists. I understand some historians debate whether or not Franco was truly a fascist, so maybe we'll just say that the right wing, the nationalist, the right wing. These guys went to go fight on the left-wing side, which, of course, was a complicated side in and of itself. It included anarchists and communists and all sorts of disparate ideological groups who were united in their resistance to Franco and his connection to rising, you know, fascism in Central Europe and Italy.

So everything I say in this poem is lifted in terms of the narrative, pretty much directly from Knox's essay. And I say that normally I don't care if poems are true, but I think that some of the details in this, like

It actually matters that I didn't make them up, because they're kind of unbelievable otherwise.

No, this is called “In the Barracks: A Found Poem.” It's a prose poem.

They had been in town only for a few days when the hills began pricking into the barracks (which once had been university classrooms) with sniper fire. That night, they crawled to their bedrolls in the corners, the cold spilling through the rooms like silt. There were no sandbags, and the bullets kept arriving, 

solitary and oddly quiet—splintering the floorboards, cracking the lintel, the heavy door, tapping around in the billowing dark for just a second—to catch somewhere, and the room went dull.

At dawn, four of the men crossed the courtyard to the library; when they returned, they were pushing carts of books. In an act of uncertain desperation, they stacked them as high as they could in the windows, and that night, the bullets came smacking into paper, 

where they stuck. In the morning, Knox took down one heavy blue book and opened it: a bullet, surprisingly cold to the touch, had burrowed into the pages, which he lifted a few at a time from around the embedded snub—until it fell loose.

The shooter could not have intended to punch out the letters that were missing, Knox thought, yet they were gone. But the book could still, more or less, be read without them, 

and he liked knowing that a bullet's approximate penetration through a treatise on the history of Western Europe was 350 pages.

Abena Ntoso: Wow. And as we were just talking about the juxtaposition of, you know, wildly different ideas. I mean, the violence of the moment, and then we've got literature. 

This is, as you mentioned, a found poem. There are so many things that I read now, whether in journalism, or in essays, that I have that same thought, like, gosh, this… I can make a really good, found poem out of this, and it's… you can't make this stuff up, right? Like, it's… it's… 

So how do you view our relationship to literature as individuals, as cities, and as a society? And in what ways do you see literature influencing individual societies and cities in the future?

Wayne Miller: That's a really interesting question. Okay, so a lot of my thinking about this was shaped by my relationship with an Albanian writer I met when I was an undergrad. It's kind of a crazy story, but it's a guy named Moikom Zeqo, who, well, he was, he was like a rising star. So I met him as an undergrad. He came to our campus to, give a talk, and, I asked him if I could, like, for a project, work with him to translate a few of his poems, and then I worked with him off and on for 20 years until he died just a few years ago, or 25 years, almost. And, he was such a fascinating person, you know, he grew up, in, communist Albania, which was the most isolated and arguably, if not the most oppressive, one of the most, oppressive and repressive communist regimes in Eastern Europe. It also was a complicated country. It was separated from the Soviet Union after a while and eventually became so diplomatically and politically isolated that it had no regular relations with any country in the world, until communism fell in the early 90s. So, I mean, just a very weird place. 

He was a historian, an archaeologist, as well as a writer. He was suppressed, his poems were suppressed there for about 10 years. And, he has a line, he says that literature and art are armor and protest. That’s the job that they serve for us as humans. But what I find so interesting is they’re armor in protest against the history that is also created by humans. So, the thing that I really learned from my relationship with Moikom and from translating his work for many years, was this idea that human beings create exactly the socio-political and socio-historical circumstances that make literature be necessary to our survival. We also make the literature and art, you know? And so we're making both of the things that are, like, bumping up against each other, pushing against each other, and that become this kind of cycle of, like, damage and repair, or something like that, and that that's the fundamental, sort of, human paradox.

I'm uncomfortable with, you know, too many universals about the human condition, but, like, this is one that I do believe is real, and is truly persistent, is that human beings create violence, create terrible historical circumstances, and create all of the ingenuity and art and brilliance that gets us out of those circumstances, and then we create those circumstances again, and then we create the stuff that responds to, protects us, and moves forward. That's the engine that keeps driving history forward, is, you know, for lack of a better term, the good and the bad of humanity turning over and over and over each other, becomes a kind of engine.

In this poem, that's sort of how I see it, this idea that… that the book can protect you from the bullet is symbolically fundamental. I mean, it's not literal, the book can't… I mean, what's amazing about this story is it was literal in the story, and that's what I love about the story is it becomes this symbolic, or this metaphor becomes literalized in this particular anecdote from Bernard Knox. But I think that, you know, that's what I found so attractive about that story, and why I wanted to have some version of it in this book is it's that literalizing of something that I think is fundamental to how human beings—how human history—operates. 

Abena Ntoso: Absolutely, absolutely. I've thought often about poetry's existence alongside some of the systematic ways of either oppressing or, you know, dehumanizing, and it's kind of like, as we do these things, you know, as we do these things, you know, the poetry is what connects us back to it, back to our humanity. And I think about that even, you know, in the context of education and school systems, and there's this kind of systematization that we do, and I wouldn't liken it to violence per se, but it kind of begets, you know, a very mechanical kind of society.

Wayne Miller: It's on the way to violence.

Abena Ntoso: Yeah, yeah.

Wayne Miller: It's not really full violence, but it's certainly adjacent to violence.

Abena Ntoso: Yeah, yeah, it sets the conditions for it, for sure.

Wayne Miller: Exactly.

Abena Ntoso: Right, because if you can remove the human elements, you know, what makes us these very fragile creatures, if you remove that, and look at everything, you know, mechanically, then it's a lot easier to…

Wayne Miller: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Abena Ntoso: … commit violence.

Wayne Miller: It's also worth remembering that, you know, literature, art, poetry, these things can also contribute to that violence. You know, that… it's not that all literature and art are, like, pure, and, you know, there's this… but I would say that the literature and art that tend to last tends to be the art that ultimately is doing the work of pushing back against violent historical, side of that machine. You know, I mean, you think about, like, some of the art and literature that, you know, has been produced in support of colonialism, in support of Nazi Germany, in support of… that tends not to be the stuff that we're now celebrating in the historical future, and that gives me some hope, you know what I mean? But also, like, it's absolutely true that we can also get the literature and art wrong, that it can serve purely as propaganda, or even partially as propaganda for things we don't believe in, so…

Abena Ntoso: Absolutely, let's… let's actually sit with that for a minute. I think it's worth thinking about, especially in the realm of publishing. We want to encourage people to develop their voices, and for voices to be heard and published. But I've often had conversations, you know, with students about what it means for something to be ready to be published, and so, as you're bringing that up, you know, this idea of the kinds of things that have the staying power, the kinds of things that connect to something inside of us that's vital. What do you look for when you are deciding what to support in terms of publishing—because you do, serve as editor, right, at Copper Nickel, and you have co-edited the book on Literary Publishing in the Twenty-first Century—and so what do you look for when you're thinking about pieces that should be shared with the world?

Wayne Miller: Yeah, I really… I love this question, and I love the way you moved us out of what we were just talking about to this, because I think that they, it's a really great relationship to draw that I hadn't directly thought about before, but, I'm sort of formulating an answer. So, so the answer I'm formulating is that my closest friend in the poetry world, and these days just my closest friend, is a poet named Kevin Prufer, who's in Houston, teaches at U of H. And Kevin once published an essay that I find very compelling, and his argument is that, that sentimental work is not work that has, like, an excess of emotion, which is often how we think about sentimentality. Rather, it's work that simplifies emotion, that human emotions are, in fact, really multifaceted and multi-layered and complex and internally conflicted, and that a sentimental piece is one that simplifies that emotion down to, like, one insufficiently complex response. 

And this is what I would say, is that for me, in terms of editing, in terms of the work that I like to support, the work that I believe in—and just the work that I like to read, the work that, you know, just in the literary world I really connect with—tends to be interested in incorporating complexity. Thinking about complexity and paradox and unresolvability, because I think that when we start easily resolving the world, we're simplifying the world, and thus we're engaged in something like intellectual sentimentality, if that makes sense. We're not seeing the full complexity. That's… when I was talking about the, you know, the way we think about cities on the American left, you know, that idealized version of the city that I'm also very guilty of engaging in all the time when I think about what I love about cities, that's a sentimental response to the city. The city is much more complex than that. And the work that I like, that I've tended to support over the years as an editor tends to be work that I think captures something about complexity and unresolvability. And I also would go on and say that I think a lot of that political work that ultimately we sort of push off into the, like, dustbin of propaganda tends to be overly simplifying, tends to not, engage with full human complexity. 

For me, that's what's interesting about poems, is they're this place of… I mean, I feel like they're intimate spaces, where often, like, I'm listening to the poet, like, through the page, you know, it's almost like a one-on-one communication, feels very different from, to me, from a novel or an essay or something else—there's something about the intimacy of poetry that really matters to me as an art form, and thus, it's a place where people can actually, where the poets I really admire spend a lot of time engaging with questions that they can never fully answer, and reminding themselves that they can't fully answer them, even if, as they go through the world, they… just to survive in the world, you often have to simplify a lot of this complexity day-to-day to, you know, to get… to… you know, if you're gonna honk at the car in front of you because he just cut you off, you can't be sitting around thinking, yes, but he's a human who maybe had a difficult day. Sometimes you just have to honk your horn, you know? But… but in a poem, that's a place where maybe you do start to think about that person in front of you, and something about their interior life that you can never fully know. 

Abena Ntoso: Absolutely. I love where we're going with this in terms of the concept of complexity as one that is what you really look for in a piece of literature that has so much to say, has so much to share, but as you mentioned, has the, the,

has this sentimentality that is summed up in it. But it's complex, right? That's something that we, I think, are starting to lean into a little bit more. I mean, I don't want to speak for everyone in society, but, you know, this year as a teacher, you know, I've been saying the word “complexity” so much, right, and asking all of these questions of my students, you know, to really explore the complexity of an issue, or the complexity of that which we think is simple. As I was listening to you, there's even this tension between complexity and simplicity that you are outlining also, right? Like, this idea that sometimes things need to be simplified because that's just, you know, day-to-day life. I can't walk around doing this contemplation all day long, but at the same time, if we are not recognizing and welcoming and acknowledging complexity in our daily lives, that's when we run the risk of making assumptions about other people and places, and, and, you know, simplifying them to the point of being able to remove the humanity aspect.

Wayne Miller: Yep.

Abena Ntoso: So that brings me also to some of the poems that explore war and violence, because it is almost integral in the development of cities over the course of hundreds of years, even thousands of years, and then even in recent times.

Well, I have two poems that I'm thinking about; one is “A History of War,” and the other is “The Death of the Frontier.” I'm thinking about how those poems do a really great job of acknowledging the role that violence has played in the development of cities. Would you be willing to read one of them?

Wayne Miller: Yeah, of course. I think that “A History of War” is probably a better one for me to read, because I remember it better, and I can also tell you exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote it. I read somewhere, because of course this was happening in the aughts, because we were in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I remember reading a really interesting article, I can't remember where, but it was talking about how the times that a culture's vocabulary expands the most is when that culture is at war because the culture has to understand the language of the culture they're fighting if they can talk about the war. And so all of this language from this other culture, enters into your vocabulary. And, you know, I just think about, like, all the language that was suddenly showing up in, in American news, you know, this language about the Middle East, these bits of Arabic, all of this stuff was finding its way into our vocabulary in this country. And of course, there are people who speak Arabic in this country, but a small minority, and all of a sudden, the sort of mainstream culture was using these bits of language.

So I started just thinking, that was just really interesting to me, and then I also felt like I needed a poem that could talk about World War I. And so that idea of, like, entrenchment, the way in which, in times of conflict, cultures become entrenched. World War I, to me, is just such a clear metaphor for that intractability, that as you move towards violence, cultures you know, move into these defensive stances. And then terrible things happened. But so I was sort of, as I was writing this, I was moving in and out of thinking about language, and thinking about culture, and then thinking about entrenchment that happens culturally. So, to me, this poem is all kind of a metaphor for that, even as it gets sort of literalized in the poem. 

So, I'll go ahead and read it. It's called “A History of War”

The fields buckled into earthworks, 

breastworks, and the men dug deeper 

into their ground. Of course, once 

the trenches were cut, they could not 

be moved—so the men adorned 

the bunkers with card tables, slicked 

the walls with posters, poured rum 

into mugs they'd brought in from town.

Each morning, they stood-to, glared 

down their rifles, through the nets 

of barbed wire, the craters and corpses, 

the litter of branches, footprints 

and shells. Across the way, bayonets 

just like theirs aimed back, as if 

the parados propped mirrors, as if 

their own blackened faces were hard 

set against them. Over there, just 

as here, the color guard raised the flag, 

the captain sloganeered through 

their bullhorns. Everyone could hear 

the echoing, and everyone roared 

and shouted—because such words 

were the river that carried them deeper, 

that kept them from sinking.

Then, as was the ritual, at nine, 

the men climbed down from the firestep, 

shot craps on the duckboards, read 

treatises in the dugouts on passion 

and Passchendaele. Anything to kill 

the time between assaults, to black out 

the instance of losing. And lose 

they did, the escadrilles circling over, 

those night-cries from the fence 

blotted slowly by death. Valor 

just the mask they wore—something 

to warm their faces when sleet 

pricked the gas clouds, when 

friends burst like wineskins, when 

three days' rain turned their fingers 

all spongy and white. Meanwhile 

in the fortresses, behind the glacis, 

the casemates were full of generals, 

tapestries, old statues of justice 

with her balancing scales: each pan 

a trench—each trench full of men 

peering through periscopes. So 

when journalists reported napalm 

at the front, the producers 

changed the name to Mark 77, 

and when the food supply ran out, 

the leaders filled the news 

pushing barrows of turkey and ham. 

And the folks at home cheered, said 

look at our wealth, said, we will surely 

carry the day. Still, in the trenches, 

the men boiled leather for nourishment, 

learned to eat rats—the same rats 

that had eaten their fallen. Then: 

our side won on the widescreen TV, 

and the leaders took shots and cigars. 

And when the last man officially 

was killed, they changed the channel.

Yet on the field, our now-protagonist 

crossed the no-man's land, waded 

into the enemy's trench. There, 

among the bunkers and dugouts, 

he gathered posters, CDs, pins, 

dictionaries, vacation brochures—. 

And from the rucksack of a body 

half sunk in the mud, he pulled 

a blueprint for a summer house.

At first, he wasn't sure—it wasn't 

a typical spoil of war—but then 

he imagined the house on his empty 

plot of land—. As he considered 

his life in the strangers' rooms 

he sensed what felt like fear. 

But focusing on the skylights 

and foreign details, he could see 

he was glad the man had been killed.

Abena Ntoso: There's so much that goes into the moments that you're describing, of the men in the trenches, and then the contrast of the people back home kind of cheering, and the complexity of it, right? I love how you use the word protagonist, because we do see these soldiers as protagonists at this point. We get to see the complexity of them, and not just, you know, them as killers, or them as heroes, but, it's… it's complex.

So, as we are being very honest and forthright about the role that war and violence have played in modernity and in civilization.

Wayne Miller: All of human history, whether we like it or not.

Abena Ntoso: Exactly, exactly, over the course of human history. So thinking about that, and then also thinking about, this idea that we, as humans, in our nature, kind of generate the kinds of conflicts that cause suffering, but then we also generate the art and literature as sort of, like, antidotes to that, ideally.

So I'm thinking now, does this idea of welcoming, and acknowledging, and supporting complexity, does it possibly have any potential to help us transcend the level of violence that has traditionally been an issue throughout? And I guess this is kind of like an idealist kind of question, right? Like, it's a very, you know… I think sometimes I try to have both the realist and the idealist, you know, on each shoulder, you know, the realist in me is thinking about what you were saying, you know, we… we just… it's in our nature, right? Even if you look at small instances, you know, in our day-to-day lives—you know, the ways that we, kind of, you know, can push one another's buttons and things like that, but yet love one another—that translates into larger and larger issues. But then the idealist on the other shoulders is kind of thinking about the generations that have been coming into adulthood, knowing a world where we are very open about emotional needs and mental and physical and spiritual health and, kind of holistic, approaches to living, and when I was growing up, there were certain things that we just assumed, you know, you just don't talk about, you know,

And yet, people are much, at least in the younger generation, from what I see, tend to be a lot more open to talking through these things. So it just makes me wonder, you know, is it possible for embracing this complexity to possibly help us transcend the violence, or at least make it less devastating? In what ways could it possibly do that?

Wayne Miller: That's a tough question. And I tend to be…

You know, like, the way you explain the idealist and the pragmatist or realist, you know, on both shoulders, I'm sort of, like, optimist and pessimist on both shoulders, as they're, like, sitting next to the idealist and the realist or something like that. You know, I will say that I don't believe that poetry, as an art, because it is so… such an intimate art—

You know, Jericho Brown has a quote that I love, where he says, poems change persons, they don't change people. And, you know, like, how did I arrive at poetry? You know, I had, you know, there are certainly people who have a lot more difficult childhoods than mine, but I had a complicating childhood with complicating parents, and the complexity of poetry, the idea of image as clarifying without explaining, to me, was, like, really important as a young reader of poems. That idea that, like, I could find moments of clarity without simplistic explanations, that idea was just really meaningful to me, and helped me a lot navigate the world as a young person trying to figure things out for myself, and about myself, about family, about the world, you know, all those kinds of things.

Do I think that the same thing that was meaningful to me in poetry has the capacity to significantly change the world? No, I don't. But I do believe that it can change, and I know that it did, change my life. Do you know what I mean?

But also, so that's like the pessimist, you know, that the value of art, I think, tends to be on the level of the individual, unless what you're making is propaganda, and at that point, I would say it's insufficiently complex to be true art.

But here's the optimistic version of this, though. It's also true that, like, when I look at all of human history, and I'm like, for the shitshow that, like, our world is right now, and it is, like, it's a disaster in a lot of ways, is there any other moment that I would, like, rather be alive in?

I'm not… I don't think so. I mean, I could maybe pick, like, a five year period, you know, I don't know, that, for me, in my locus in the world, it might have been a better place to be. You know, like, jazz in 1963? Like, that was a pretty great moment for, like, that art. Do you know what I mean? Like, I can pick moments for things that I want to idealize or connect with, but if I think, like, the whole picture of human activity—Yes, the world is still full of violence, but it's not quite the way it was, like, in the middle of World War II, you know? That was a worse time to be alive, in terms of just your pure chances of dying from horrific violence. You know, did I want to be alive when plagues were all over the place? No, you know? Like, yes, it's true that COVID was pretty terrible, but also, we had a lot of medical knowledge and guidance that was working things out. It didn't immediately have all the answers, but, like, we had tools to improve our reaction to this terrible thing compared to what we would have had a hundred or two hundred or five hundred years ago. You know, for all of the problems around, you know, race and intercultural conflict and all of these kinds of things in the world, would I rather be alive, you know, when the Spanish are colonizing Latin America? No. You know what I mean? Like, just think about all these other moments in history. And then the big one for me that I always used to joke about with my classes, but I think is actually a fair thing to consider is, if you go back more than about 120 years, you don't have anesthesia. And on the most basic level, medically, I want to live in a time with anesthesia, you know? 

So, like, I think it's possible for it to be true that the world is a shitshow, and also that this is a pretty good time to be alive compared to all the other moments of human history. Do we still have tons of work to do? Yes. But I'm not sure poetry is the place to be doing that work if your job is to improve the socio-political reality. If your goal is to connect with individuals about the reality of being… the complex reality of being alive, and deepening, you know, conversations like the one we're having, you know, about all of this complexity and art and all of this stuff that is this armor of protest and survival, that armor is worn individually, you know what I mean? And I think that the arts tend to equip individuals with that armor. 

So I'm, I think, like you, I'm both an idealist and a realist, and I think I'm an optimist and a pessimist. I think art, particularly a small art like poetry. I mean, if you get into questions of, like, how, like, something like film that's truly a mass media version of art, like, I think it does have a larger role to play. You know, I can think about how particular television shows, particular movies, I think, played an outsized role in advocating for LGBTQ rights, and really changed people's minds in a short period of time, who had just never really thought about these questions.

But also, when you get into mass media arts, then you also get entangled with money, and those arts become really complicated. Like, there's something really pure about poetry as an art form, particularly in its ability to navigate impurity in the world because there's no money in it. Even, like, you know, I think about Ada Limon, who's a poet who's, you know, who I've known for a long time, since before she was, like, a super famous poet, and, you know, I think she's probably living off poetry, but is she rich? No. You know what I mean? It's not the same as these mass art forms. And that's what's lovely about it, but that's also why I think it has much less of a societal impact. That's why Jericho says it changes “persons,” not “people.”

Abena Ntoso: And I like that the emphasis is on, you know, persons as in individuals, and even, maybe arriving at this idea that in our own way, however we get there, whether poetry kind of brings us there, or film, or maybe some other practice that we have in our lives, however we get there, as individuals, really being able to balance complexity and simplicity, and being able to acknowledge tensions and resist simplifying that which is inherently complex.

Wayne Miller: Yes.

Abena Ntoso: Doing that is what matters. I feel like… Not just in our conversation, but in the book also, that is the work that you're doing, that you are, trying to balance that complexity, those tensions, and not give in to simplicity, yet, as you mentioned, you know, presenting it in these images that don't simplify, but that do contain.

Wayne Miller: Thank you. That's all I want to do, so thank you. That really… that really means a lot to me.

Abena Ntoso: I really appreciate your time, your insights, thank you so much.

We’ve been talking today with poet Wayne Miller. You’ve been listening to Backlit, and I am your host, Abena Ntoso. You can find more of Wayne’s work at waynemillerpoet.com  Wayne’s most recent book, The End of Childhood, along withThe City, Our City, are available for purchase using the link in the episode details. Today’s episode was produced in my home studio in Houston, Texas, in conjunction with Bricolage Lit, and features the song “Campfire” by Midnight Daydream in the intro and outro. For more information on Backlit, please visit abenantoso.com/podcast/backlit. Thank you for listening, and until next time, be well, read books, and let’s generate some new ideas together.