All that could go wrong  Fathering Words Galbus on Ethelbert In Shadows There Are Men   It Must Be Lester Young  Omar, Books, and Me  New York: St. Vincent's Hospital  A Poem for Richard   Responses to A New Black Power   Responsibility of Blacks in Cyberspace Sketch Bio E Ethelbert Miller *   *   *   *   * Related files 1935 A Memoir Amazing Grace  Amiri Baraka Beltway: An Online Poetry Quarterly Black Arts and Black Power Figures Deliverance Fishbone and Blues Give Peace a Chance  Here I Go Again Katrina Survivor Stories Lasana Sekou Lee Meitzen Grue Lifting  Louis Reyes Rivera Mama's Magic   Mango  Mona Lisa Saloy my backyard  Mystic Mam-A-Jama—a Poem  Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep Poem for Rudy  Purple Ribbon Cross News Refuse to Watch You Die  Search for Black Men: Vietnam Post-Mortem  Searching for my Great Grandmother at Stonewall  She   Terry O'Neal Bio  Terry O'Neal Reviews  Those Were the Days  Transcript of Harry Belafonte-Larry King Interview Tsunami  Voices of the Culture What's up Detroit?  What We Carry  Yusef Komunyakaa

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E Ethelbert Miller Interview, Part 1—I’ll say publicly right now that African-American music is killing black people. But it’s not just the music. It is the very essence of who we are. And you see, what happens: you cannot—here is where the critics are wrong—you cannot justify this [violence and hatred in the music]. You cannot say this goes back to the tradition. This is not part of the tradition. It is not part of your tradition. Don’t link it and don’t claim it. It is not part of your tradition. You know, for example, you could not go out here and tell someone “Imma wash your mouth out with soap!” You know you can’t do that anymore. And you know, growing up, that when you heard those words, they struck a particular chord, a note that you heard, a boundary or something that established a certain moral principle to guide you. You did not use certain words because you knew what those words meant. You see? Or when you did use those words, you knew what those words meant. You might see your uncle or grandfather—one of the elders—and something happens and you hear them curse about maybe what the white people did to the church. And you understood then what that word meant. You see? And so what happened: for those of us preserving the traditions, to understand this particular point now, we have to defend the language and traditions, and we have not defended them well. Post No Ills

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E Ethelbert Miller Interview, Part 2—The writers who we glorify now are like Yusef Komunyakaa. Yusef is quiet, but I don’t see Yusef speaking out. If we use him as a model, people say, “I want to write like Yusef Komunyakaa,” but where’s the politics? The politics might still come from someone like Sonia Sanchez, but she is like Baraka. We admire Sonia and Baraka because they came out of the Black Arts Movement. But where’s the apprenticeship? And that’s the word to use: apprenticeship. Not model, not workshop, apprenticeship. The difference between an apprenticeship and a workshop is that I will sit here and take only one person. You may watch me do something and then we would do something together. And every time I would correct it, but we would do it together. We might be making a wall together. You’re standing and I’m standing and we’re talking and stuff like that. I don’t see anybody workshopping their poems that way. Now you have people claiming, “That’s my student,” “That’s my teacher,” but that’s from a workshop. That’s not an apprenticeship. So if we put that word in, we have a different type of relationship. In the future, for us to produce these new type of writers, they will have to come out of a situation where there’s an apprenticeship that’s taken place. Post No Ills

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Miller has always believed that poetry serves a variety of roles. It can provide healing or catharsis, laughter or correction. It can bring abstract ideas down to the circumstances of one individual’s life, or an event or choice in a person’s day. His work can be poignant and comedic. It covers a range of topics including sports, jazz, politics, love and family. For further reading besides the poems posted here, I recommend  readers find First Light or Whispers, Secrets and Promises. For a glimpse of some of the ways he has supported the lives of other poets, there are his two excellent anthologies. In Search of Color Everywhere is a gorgeous volume assembling a variety of poets who write with love and affection on various aspects of African American life. It is the kind of book Miller wished he could have been introduced to when he was growing up.  The other, Beyond the Frontier, features African American writers who are some of the strongest voices in the generation after Miller. Both volumes group poetry thematically, rather than by the dates of the authors’ lives or their arbitrary place in the alphabet.   

His latest volume, How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love (Curbstone, 2004) traverses perennial territory of love, loneliness and desire, but also breaks new ground. Galbus on Ethelbert

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This memoir is literary and lyrical, a “standard” American story of how a man came to find and express his voice in spite of circumstances that might have easily thwarted his development. It is a bildungsroman keenly aware of the literary tradition of African American writers but also of ordinary people who manage to piece together a life. It acknowledges the price of spiritual and artistic poverty in a household within which a boy could become a writer.  Its power is derived from the poetic language, the depth of emotional texture, and the persistent mystification of making one’s way. Loving without lapsing into sentimentality, this is a view from someone actively engaged with twentieth-century American culture.  Fathering Words

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I really like Walter Mosley. I love his fiction. But what he wrote for the latest issue of The Nation (February 27, 2006) deserves closer scrutiny. The title of his essay is "A New Black Power." Of course this caught my attention. I loved Carmichael (Ture) when I first headed off to college. Next to my books by Marshall McLuhan was a copy of Black Power. Reading Mosley's essay, I suddenly realized it's graffiti. Something on a wall you read because it's there. I subscribe to The Nation. Graffiti is shorthand.

Mosley means well and so I respect him as much as I like Mariah's voice. But I'm not listening to Aretha and Mosley is not C.L.R. James or Walter Rodney. Instead of providing serious intellectual thought, his essay sounds like a response to the Gary Convention, or maybe Jesse Jackson after four years of the Carter presidency. Remember when folks were upset with the Democratic Party and didn't know what to do? Responses to A New Black Power

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Hey R-Man:

As a literary activist the preservation of material is very important to me. I've created an archives on my website linking to places where I've deposited items. I currently work with 3 institutions:

Many years ago I gave a talk at GW and mentioned the need for a literary archives for Washington writers. This is something GW is finally very serious about developing. They have contacted many Washington writers and have made arrangements for the depositing of material. I've given them about 12 boxes of stuff. Since my daughter attends GW Law School, I feel I have a connection to the institution.

Emory & Henry College in Virginia has some of my early papers, and important letters and correspondence from people like Alice Walker. I have an honorary degree from E&H.

Finally, I work with the Givens Collection (University Of MN). This is a wonderful African American Collection that many people don't know about. Excellent staff. Clarence Major gave his papers to Givens. I gave all my June Jordan correspondence to them a few years ago. Recently I've sent them my correspondence with Charles Johnson, and my files on Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton and August Wilson.

I mention all of this so that you might think about giving material to institutions that are serious about preserving literary history. You're making history - no need to lose it. :-)

Happy Holidays!  Wishing you the best in 2008.

E. Ethelbert Miller
www.eethelbertmiller1.blogspot.com

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update 2 August 2008