MALCOLM MILLER REVIEW
Jennifer Martelli
About a year ago, I attended a screening of Unburying Malcolm Miller, a documentary by Kevin Carey and Mark Hillringhouse. The film chronicled the life and poetry of Malcolm Miller, a man who lived, wrote, and died in Salem, Massachusetts in 2014. The documentary featured interviews with estranged family members, professors from Salem State University, police officers, friends, old girlfriends. After the film, there was a Q & A period. Many audience members, who hadn’t seen Miller in over 30 years, were visibly upset at this portrayal of a man whom many saw as frightening at worst, odd at best. These people knew him as brilliant and funny. Other people in the audience knew him from his later years, and witnessed a different man, one whose trauma had progressed, whose emotional landscape may have eclipsed his poetic talents. In my own life, I had friends who felt deeply about Malcolm Miller. I had friends who avoided him. I had friends who found genius in his writing, like Rod Kessler, enough to collect and sift through his thousands of poems, organizing them into What I Am Always Waiting For: Selected Poems. I realized that experiencing Malcolm Miller was much like experiencing the elephant in that ancient Indian parable of the five blind men who each touch a different part of the great beast and come away with distinct impressions. Miller’s poems, at their best, are grounded in place and reflect his knowledge of form by defying it. They express a deep self-knowledge, which at times is tragic and at times, humorous.
Malcolm Miller, who was not only well-read but well-travelled, wrote his strongest poems about place. The Salem, Massachusetts that he trod is familiar to me, and I wondered if I had ever passed by him. Miller’s Salem is filled with ghosts. He writes in “Middle-Aged Poet,”
I pass them by in the heart of downtown
and they stare straight ahead and step lively
as though I am a rather sorry rascal
who will ask for money or say a terrible thing.
Although Miller sees other-worldly figures, he embraces the people in the city that he encounters. In “State College Canteen,” he elevates the man who fills the soda machines with beer, and observes
never did the philosophy professor
a master of logical positivisim
seem more absurd
//
and the English
instructors by afternoon were being
booed from the building
for not knowing how to teach
young people how to return
to the sun
Miller displays a deep understanding of the loneliness of the unsung late-night workers throughout Salem. In “The Sad Girl Who Sells Gasoline,” he describes the girl at the all-night station and asks us,
if you drive by wave at the sad girl
will you and smile as though yes
life is good it’s all right
and if you need to fill your tank stop
there and tell her the gasoline is marvelous
Miller sanctifies loneliness, a holiness borne from walking the city. At the “Dunkin Donuts On the Coast of Massachusetts,” the young girl who serves “all right” coffee during the graveyard shift is a “weary-eyed goddess//but a goddess none the less.” This poem, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place in Winter,” is insistent
in this god
blessedly open place
or don’t you know
don’t you know yet
about closed up towns
in cold dark times
Miller creates this urgency by his lack of punctuation, his syntax, and his lineation. All of his poems avoid punctuation, and while many rely on syntactic line-breaks to guide the reader (with little or no enjambment), Malcolm surprises by breaking poetic rules. These poems thrust the reader into scenes, or off ledges, to the next line. I loved reading “Montreal Rue Victoria Near McGill,” just for the enjambment:
when we were just beginning to remember
you said to get a strong
board to put under the mattress
the room was a little
bigger than the bed
over the everyday table I composed so
so poems on
The ending of each line leaves the reader unsteady; we rely on the breaks to logically guide us, but there is a teetering. Is the speaker referring to the couple as “beginning to remember?” or are they just beginning, and he is asking her to remember what she said? Miller then breaks the modifier “so/so” in that penultimate line. The leap to the next is unexpected, and yet choreographed; Miller tells us that he is a mediocre poet. In “Baudelaire Lectures in Belgium to Raise Money,” not only does his lineation become bold, but his word-choices daring, as well,
almost nobody
empty rowed tombstone chains
in the voluminous hall his voice
a fly
trapped and bumping
a spider web
of silence fed
on his last hopes
last lost dreams
back to the city
of lights disheveled needing
a shave life
long dandy hatless now walking
blindly towards nowhere but hated
no one saw every
body was Baudelaire every
where was Belgium
There are also opportunities for Miller’s bittersweet humor. “What Happens to Promising Poets” offers sardonic wisdom, “what happens to them is what happens/to April and Christmas/presents and thousands of dollars.” Just as Miller moved around Salem, so do his poems move from voice to voice. The structure in “I Am Waiting” relies on repetition for emotional travel, as Miller takes the reader from “Yankees 2 Tigers 2,” to the “real results,”
despair 12 joy 2
propaganda 6 truth 1
piggishness 15 piety 1
suicides 3 resurrections 0
Miller gives us the sense that he is also making fun of his own narcissism; although the poems are not “meta” in the exact definition of the word, I felt that his observations were internal as well. Written as a vignette, the poem “The Man Who Was Wrong But Right” is a smart and funny moment of courtship and seduction:
he realized then she was not
pointing but trying to get a coat
sleeve more fully on
nor had she stared at him but merely sat
with a fixed gaze
you have been wrong in everything thus
far she murmured
Miller revels in the observations of place, poetry, and self. For all his inner loneliness, there is an awareness of himself in relation to his community. “I am getting up the courage,” he writes in “Before the Nunnery,” where “they will see me burst a door/and they’ll scream and call the cops.” What is this creature we’re encountering? What do we make of these poems written by “some genius or crack-/pot?” As I read the poems in Malcolm Miller’s What I Am Always Waiting For, I’d put the book down, and look out, experiencing a heart-aching yearning which seems to be the essence of so many of his poems. This is the work of a poet well-versed in his own dark streets, one who has always wanted to be
even a murderer perhaps
cornered in the blood of song
the murderer of their usual merely acceptable
selves in behalf of their greatest unslavery hour
Jennifer Martelli is the author of My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Her chapbook, After Bird, was the winner of the Grey Book Press open reading, 2016. Her work has appeared in Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review (winner, Photo Finish contest), Italian Americana, The Sycamore Review, and Poetry. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.