Online Exclusive: A Conversation with Joseph Millar

RAISED IN PENNSYLVANIA, JOSEPH MILLAR RECIEVED an MA from Johns Hopkins University in 1970, after which worked a variety of jobs, including telephone installation and commercial fishing. His writing includes two books of poetry from Eastern Washington University Press, Overtime (2001) and Fortune (2006), as well as two chapbooks, Slow Dancer and Midlife: (Passionate Lives: Eight Autobiographical Poem Cycles). In 1995, Millar was awarded first place in the Montalvo Biennial Poetry Competition, judged by Garrett Hongo, and won second place in the National Writers’ Union Competition, judged by Philip Levine. His work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Poetry International, and Prairie Schooner. He has also been the recipient of fellowships from the Montalvo Center for the Arts and Oregon Literary Arts.

Yusef Komunyakaa has described Millar as a “poet we can believe,” because his poetry is not only involved with commonplace jobs, possessions, and emotions, but to his voice is an authority for these things.

We met over lunch with Millar at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane.

JOSEPH MILLAR

I’m warning you right now that I read the interview with Gerry Stern and he is a hell of a lot smarter than I am.

ZACHARY VINEYARD

But you’ll be funnier right?

MILLAR

Well, OK.

Gerry came and visited me at my house one time. He didn’t know I had a back porch because he hadn’t been to the house. And the bathroom is right next to where he was sleeping. So he wakes up in the morning and he has to piss like a racehorse, and right out on the front porch he’s standing there, peeing. And the front porch is like eight feet from the sidewalk. And he said two people went by, they were very polite. He said they never looked up at him. [Laughs.]

VINEYARD

I can imagine him out there with crazy hair.

MILLAR

He’s a wild man.

VINEYARD

Not to beat up the tone of the interview, but do you consider yourself the speaker of the poems in Overtime?

MILLAR

That’s the thing about poetry with me. I can’t get out of it. I know people who write from different perspectives, you know, who write persona poems and stuff, but I think the subtext to all poems—I mean the really good ones—is that the author is the speaker. They’re in there. One of the best poets who acts as a speaker in her work is Louise Gluck, in Wild Irises. You know she’s in there. All those needling little observations she makes, and the short discursive statements about life that aren’t very salutary—that’s her. And anybody who writes a persona poem can’t really inhabit the persona they’re writing about, it’s just, it’ll be a shitty persona. It won’t have any juice. I didn’t even try and write persona poems for Overtime. The first-person speaker in there, I’m afraid, is the dreaded I.

VINEYARD

And that’s obviously important to you.

MILLAR

I think the best thing about writing, when it’s working, is that you somehow figure out how to have it be direct, like it’s what you mean.  You know how that is? You get a poem going and say, “Oh, that’s how it was. That’s how it was. There’s that old man standing there by the railroad station with the paper blowing in the streets and that’s how it was that day” and it’s coming back to you and you’re getting it down. And you go, this is hella cool. To me, you have a real piece of life that you’ve lived and you’ve got it down on paper in some way.  And when that happens, it’s magical and it makes you feel great. So people that say, “Oh the I sucks, get the I out of there it’s all so boring and everything” they’re just doing a bunch of smoke and mirrors to me, bunch of misdirection. If the I really isn’t in there, What are they doing it for? That’s a question you’ve got to ask yourself when you read a poem. If you have to ask yourself why the person wrote it, that basically means the poem bites. Pretty much. You can say, “This poem, I don’t know why the guy wrote it.” The next statement is, “Because I don’t care about it and it doesn’t seem like they care about it.”

HALINEN

Do you tend to generally write from memory or do you start from something from the present moment? How do you get a poem started?

MILLAR

Memory, mostly. And I have short lists in my notebook of stuff I mean to write about someday. Because I’ll forget it. So I write it down in notes. When a woman has a flat tire, or something like that. And I can’t always make a poem out of it, but I come back and give it a try a lot of time.

HALINEN

Do you usually find yourself writing in the same kind of vein?

MILLAR

Well, that was Overtime because when I wrote a lot of those poems, my life was changing a lot. In ’97, I quit working on the trades, and now I’m like, kinda fat and blah. So you think that I would be writing poems with gratitude, which is really how I feel a lot of times. But what happens when I sit down and go write the poems are angry, sad poems, a kind of poems that are not so cheery. So, I’m not real proud of that, but I don’t know what to do about it because that’s the kind I’m getting so I’m taking them and I say thank you and keep going. Sometimes I read wonderful praise poems. The whole tradition of praise poetry, from Hopkins on, and before him, Wordsworth, Shakespeare. Praise poems. Praise the world. Even the neos and Adam Zagajewski, and the poets captured that lived through the war, they’re writing praise poems. And here I am just this gringo American, you know, had to work for a living for a while and raise some kids and all I can do is piss and moan. What’s the matter with me?

HALINEN

Your poems have a great deal of attention to sound, and I wondered if that comes right away as you’re writing or if that’s something that you pay attention to in revision.

MILLAR

You know I think I sort of have a natural ear for language in that way and especially internal rhyme. I do a lot of that. And the phrases occur to me that way. And of course when I go back to revise if I can think of a way to amplify that, I do. That’s one thing that I do pretty good naturally.

HALINEN

Do you consider writing poems to be work or play or somewhere in between?

MILLAR

It’s work, but you know, it’s probably like you guys consider it. It’s work. When you’ve been doing it for even the amount of time I’ve been doing it, which is longer than you guys, it gets more like “I’ve got to go back in there” and then sometimes I put it off. And poetry, you don’t get to go back to the same one like a fiction writer does. The poem’s over. So when you go back in there, you have to start over again. And sometimes I’m like, “I might have forgotten how to do this, how did I do that? Can I still do that?” And then I’m thinking, “I can’t do this anymore.” William Stafford has this one poem where he’s trying to climb up a cliff, and it ends up where he goes, “I made it again.” That’s the last line. And that’s what it’s like. It’s always coming from some place where you can’t exactly tell how you did it. The ones that are good, especially. So to me, it’s messing with that thing that I can’t make work yet or whatever it is. But then after I get workout, or starting a run.  You’ve got to stretch, and you’ve got to get out there and it’s raining, and goddamnit. But then you get going a little bit, and you’re going oh yeah, okay.

VINEYARD

And you know that later on you’re going to forget this process, like it’s just going to go fleeting out the window.

MILLAR

Yeah, and it’s going to be over, and you’re going to over and you’re going to be a greedy bastard and go I want some more. There’s never enough. It’s like sex, there’s never enough. And that’s the thing about poetry, there’s magic like that. So it’s work and play and magic and it’s frightening. Sometimes when I don’t write for a long time I get anxious. I want to pick a fight with somebody, I want to break something. But, I live in a house with a family. I can’t go around doing that, obviously.

HALINEN

What’s it like being married to a poet?

MILLAR

Oh, well, being married to my wife, especially, it’s all good. It’s mostly a good deal. There’s times when it’s not such a good deal but mostly it’s a good deal. Because I can show her my stuff and she doesn’t lie to me. She risks me getting pissed off at her, which I do. “I’m not changing that! That’s the whole goddamn thing, right there! What do you mean change that?” and the thing is, most of the time it’s right. So I really trust her. But it’s hard sometimes because we’re both writing in the house and the phone rings and you say, “I answered it last time.” So that’s there. Who’s going to do this, and who’s going to do that. We’re got the chores of living divided up so it’s pretty even. And we’ve both been married before and we know what some of the pitfalls of a relationship can be. A lot of times there’s certain things, if you’re married with somebody, in a relationship with them, that you should never say, and I think people, and this is a little of a digression, sometimes people think in the name of honesty, of really having a really good, really honestly grounded relationship, you should be able to say anything to each other. And the thing is you can’t. You can’t say anything you want. You could say something to somebody and you’ll never be able to take it back. And this is my experience. And the damage is done, and it’s never the same after that. Because when we’re intimate with one another, we know things about each other nobody else knows. So there’s a rule of decency that comes in there. Poetry for us, and when we’ve had an argument talking something about poetry and it’s like a neutral ground. You’ll say something like, “I saw these translations of Transtromer” or something and the other person will say, “oh yeah?” and you start talking again about this thing that you both. . .

INTERVIEWER

You both have wide respect for.

MILLAR

Yeah, yeah. Something like that, you know. So that’s a good thing that it does, being married to a poet. It gives us a way of relating that’s real personal, yet it’s impersonal, too. Because there’s an impersonality about art. There’s an impersonality about it. There’s a story about Miles Davis, where somebody in his family, I want to say his sister but I’m not sure, said “Listen, I want you to use so and so, somebody’s cousin, I want you to use him as a drummer,” and Miles said, “Well I’ve played with that guy already, and he ain’t that good.” And she goes, “Yeah, but come on, but he’s our friend.” And Miles says, “Music doesn’t have friends like that.” And that’s the way poetry is, too. It doesn’t have friends like that. Now you know you don’t always play bad. If you look around you at the poetry scene, that thing is not always evident. Sometimes you see in somebody or in somebody’s friend, they’re getting over a lot and they’re not that good. But it doesn’t change the thing of the poetry. As Keats looked at it or Shakespeare looked at it, or Dante. It’s upon here and you’re bringing your little flowers to it. In our case they’re kind of like dandelions. But, you know, you’re bringing your little flowers to it. In our case they’re kind of like dandelions. But, you know, you’re bringing it over there and it’s what it is and they’re as good as you can make them. And no matter who publishes the book or who writes on that back of it, it’s as good as the poems are. And sometimes you’ll read poetry in the big houses and you’ll go, “you know. That guy shouldn’t have published this.” It’s got maybe five good poems in there and about thirty that are pretty mediocre. So you can’t tell and there’s an impersonality to it. And that’s part of the thing about it that’s cool.

HALINEN

Have you ever co-written a poem with Dorianne or have you ever thought about doing that?

MILLAR

Everything that comes out of our house is co-written in a way because we look at each other’s stuff and pencil it up and sometimes give each other lines and give each other images. But, no. I don’t have anything against it collaborations. But collaborations on poems, I don’t know. I’m not that thrilled with the idea.

VINEYARD

Especially if you’re writing from your perspective, the I.

MILLAR

The dreaded I. Plus, you’re not going to make any money at poetry, co collaboration doesn’t help out much. The most money you’re going to make is if you get really big and successful.

HALINEN

Christopher Howell, in an interview with Tod Marshall, said that poems written during Vietnam forced people to act, and since then poems haven’t accomplished that same type of “motivation.” How much power to do think the individual has to bring about positive change to such complex problems, and how do you see the poet’s role as a means toward bringing those changes?

MILLAR

When I was your guys’ ages, and the war was going on, there was a good chance the government would reach in, grab your ass, and send you to the jungle to be shot at by the Vietcong. So, there was a galvanizing effect in the country. We didn’t have all these “smart bomb” things they have now, where you can invade a country from the air. So, in other words, the poets against the war in the 60s, I agree with Chris, did motivate people to speak out. I remember watching Robert Bly read and being very inspired by him. Abby Hoffman was reading right before the war in 1969, back when the Chicago Seven were up for trial, and he talked about flying into Washington D.C. on the plane, and he said you could see the Patomic River going out like a big leg, and another river in D.C. going out the other way like a big leg, and then the Washington Monument sticking straight up between them like a big cock. [Laughs]. I just thought this guy was hella cool.

So, that whole time was, you know, different. The government could put hands on you personally, in a way they couldn’t do before. There was a draft. That had a lot more to do with it than Bly, Levertov, Stafford, and Kinnell going around reading poems. Although that was a great thing, I don’t think it was the poems.

Social injustice toward black people during the 60s was also a motivating force behind poetry. There’s a book by David Hilliard called This Side of Glory, and he was the minister for information for the Black Panthers. He talks about the beginning of the Black Panther party, which was him and Hewey Newton and Bobby Seal getting together to read a bunch of communist literature, getting all amped-up about it, and deciding that they would get some guns and patrol Oakland. If they saw the cops unfairly shake someone down, they were going to break loose. And, too, they were going to have this free breakfast program for children. They were going to do things in their community.

We lived in a much more fascist state during Vietnam. We were thinking, back then, that there was going to be a revolution. We were really thinking we were going to have an end to racism, and other things. Compared to 1954, racism was a lot better, so anyone who said they wanted to go back to the way it was before the 60s was crazy. Now they try and discredit the 60s by saying it was just a bunch of drug-induced kids running around. Bullshit. We stopped a war. But it wasn’t the poems. Poems can do more now—and I know this is a long fucking answer. All I know is I like the idea of having peace in your life, and not being an asshole.

You got anymore artistic questions? That was too political.

HALINEN

In a book that’s primarily about work, why did you choose to include love poems?

MILLAR

Oh easy. Work is the other side of love. Work is what we do, and you have to have a good attitude about that. Work is love made manifest. As I think Freud said: You have a lot more work ahead of you after your mistress is fucking around. [Laughs.]