|
Books by E. Ethelbert
Miller
How We Sleep
on the Nights We Don’t Make Love
/
Fathering Words /
In
Search of Color Everywhere
First Light: New and Selected Poems /
Where are
the Love Poems for Dictators? /
Whispers, Secrets and Promises
Beyond
The Frontier: African-American Poetry for the 21st
Century /
Season of Hunger/Cry of Rain
Synergy:
An Anthology of Washington D.C. Black Poetry
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* * * *
Bio-Sketch
E. Ethelbert
Miller,
former chair of the Humanities Council of Washington DC, is a
core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars at
Bennington College. He has been the director of the
African American Resource Center at Howard University since
1974.
His
In
Search of Color Everywhere (1994) was awarded the 1994
PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. The anthology was also a Book
of the Month Club selection.
Mr. Miller was one of the 60 American authors
selected and honored by Laura Bush and The White House at the
First National Book Festival, September 8, 2001.
Mr. Miller has served as a visiting professor at
the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and adjunct professor
at American University. In 1996 he was the Jessie Ball
DuPont Scholar at Emory & Henry College. He was
scholar-in-residence at George Mason University for the
Spring 2000 semester, and the 2001 Carell
Writer-in-Residence at Harpeth Hall School in Nashville,
Tennessee.
more bio
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* * * *
Bio-Update.—E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary
activist. He is board chair of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
He is also a board member of The Writer's Center and editor of Poet
Lore magazine. The author of several collections of poems, his book
How We Sleep
on the Nights We Don’t Make Love
(Curbstone Press, 2004) was an Independent Publisher
Award Finalist. Miller received the 1995 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize.
He was awarded in 1996 an honorary
doctorate of literature from Emory & Henry College. In 2003 his memoir
Fathering Words: The Making of an African American
Writer (St. Martin's Press, 2000) was selected by the DC WE
READ for its one book, one city program sponsored by the D.C. Public
Libraries. In 2004 Miller was awarded a Fulbright to visit Israel. Poets
& Writers presented him with the 2007 Barnes & Noble/Writers for Writers
Award. Mr. Miller is often heard on National Public Radio (NPR)
* * *
* *
Speaking of Faith: Black and Universal
(audio file)
E. Ethelbert Miller is the board chairman of the
Institute for Policy Studies. He has been the director of the African
American Resource Center at Howard University since 1974. Miller is a
former chairman of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C., and a
former core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars at
Bennington College. He is the editor of Poet Lore and the author of
several collections of poetry and two memoirs.
NPR
*
* * * *
This is what the E Stands for
Below are the organizations I represent. They all advance the things I
believe in: progressive politics, poetry, African American culture,
social networking and the construction of the Beloved Community. I hope
you will support these organizations in 2009. Visit the Provisions
Library site, subscribe to Poet Lore magazine, or simply come to Howard
University and visit the African American Resource Center located on the
3rd floor of Founders Library. If you're in another city, state or
country, just drop me a note at:
emiller698@aol.com. Let me know what you're doing—maybe I can help.
* * *
* *
Speaking of Faith: Black and Universal
(audio file)
*
* * * *
The Next Media Game
So now watch how the media will
begin to mention how the future of the Obama Administration will be
decided by who he picks to be on the Supreme Court. So much for
health-care. No matter who Obama picks Republicans will object to that
person view of the law. It's important to place a liberal voice on the
court in order to swing American politics back to the center. A liberal
win in the court fight sets up a liberal win in the fall. Republicans
will find Obama to be as difficult defeat as Reagan was for Democrats.
We might be at the beginning of what historians will call a Second
Reconstruction. A time of major changes that prepares us for a radical
future.
The battle will be fought in the
media and the attempt to define not just the truth but what it means to
be American. The battle will be over the control of myths. The victim in
all of this will be American history. Will the revisionists step
forward? A key battle will be between Newt and Palin. A man with
conservative ideas against a woman with conservative jokes. Reaching the
future is not a laughing matter. The Left has to understand how to
govern. The word we need to introduce back into our vocabulary is
progressive. We need to embrace the future as a place that will be
different in terms of values and beliefs. We need to define ourselves as
new men and women.
Why for example are we holding on
to old ways of understanding religion as well as sex and race? The fact
that the word Negro is still on the census form should tell us
something. What year is it? E-Note 10 April 2010
http://www.eethelbertmiller1.blogspot.com/
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* * * *
On Marc Steiner Show
How do we value poetry, music, and language in our modern era?
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* * * *
E. Ethelbert Miller Nov 2009—April 10, 2010
At
The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn NY
recorded November 20, 2009 by
Troy Johnson, AALBC.com
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* * * *
Table
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|
Free Fall
When the bearded man on the screen
says the word infidel I collapse
into the wrong century. I fall through
the hands
of pirates and warlords. Every poet
should own a cape.
Every poem should have a secret
identity.
During emergencies break glass and read.
Arm yourself but don't be a Crusade.
If you find yourself on the road to
Mecca
ask the heart for directions. All
prayers
have receipts. Every religion comes with
a price.
E. Ethelbert Miller |
* * * * *
Finding Aid to
the Eugene Ethelbert Miller Papers
(22
September 2000) Emory & Henry College Special
Collections and Archives
* * * * *
 |
The 5th Inning by E. Ethelbert Miller
The 5th Inning is poet and literary
activist E. Ethelbert Miller's second memoir. Coming after
Fathering Words: The Making of An
African American Writer
(published in 2000), this book finds Miller returning to
baseball, the game of his youth, in order to find the
metaphor that will provide the measurement of his life.
Almost 60, he ponders whether his life can now be entered
into the official record books as a success or failure.
The 5th Inning is one man's examination
of personal relationships, depression, love and loss. This
is a story of the individual alone on the pitching mound or
in the batters box. It's a box score filled with
remembrance. It's a combination of baseball and the blues.
To see a clip of Ethelbert reading
The 5th Inning click here:
http://www.eethelbertmiller.com/etube |
* * * * *
April Fool’s
Day: An American Sonnet
You go to work today and someone
enters your office around 10AM.
They inform you that your job has
been abolished.
You think it's a prank, an April
Fool's Day joke.
But after Thursday comes Friday.
You stare at the weekend - naked and
alone.
You wonder how you're going to make
ends meet.
Your tears become April showers.
You have no idea what you're going
to do.
One night you're sitting in the dark
talking to yourself.
How did this suddenly happen?
You walk across the room and search
through your old record albums.
You pull John Coltrane playing
"After The Rain" from the stack.
The music places her arms around
you.
It's almost May and you wonder if
you're too old to go steady.
1 April 2010 |
* * * * *
Dancing
to the New Music
By E. Ethelbert Miller
March 15, 2010
Can
contemporary poets create something today just
as visionary? Must we find new words to use?
Should we go back and reclaim the old ones? I
would like to find a way to use "utopia" again.
What if my new poems resemble text messages?
What if the entire process changes—and the way I
create? As the world fits in my hand or
BlackBerry, how do I handle the power of
language once again? What does it mean to be a
poet during this time of Obama? If we witnessed
a political milestone in world history in 2008,
did it have a cultural counterpart? For those of
us who failed to see Obama becoming president of
the United States, what else did we fail to see?
I wrote celebratory poems after Obama's
election; in one I tried to be experimental,
because I felt it was the only way I could
structurally produce work that echoed the times.
I'm more
aware these days of how my poetry explores the
themes of religion and spirituality. Whereas
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the twentieth century
being shaped by the color line, it has become
obvious that the twenty-first century will be
influenced by religion. I've noticed already how
Islamic and Buddhist terms have slipped into my
poems like a sideman with a horn. The Islamic
references I used in the late 1960s were an
outgrowth of being influenced by the Black Arts
Movement and Malcolm X. Today I have a better
understanding of the faith, and I wrestle with
the complexity of Islamic law. My concern with
issues of gender encourages me to listen more to
how Muslims are dealing with these matters. A
number of my fellow poets are Buddhists, and I
find a special kinship with them. I find the
love poems I write are often influenced by
certain concepts that I feel show a compassion
for mankind. If my poems are going to be
antiwar, I want them first to address the issue
of love. I want them to have the strength to
love.
As the new
decade unfolds, I find myself more hesitant to
recite in public. Too often the venues seem to
cater to performance and entertainment. I worry
at times about the poems that people dress in
Halloween outfits. I'm curious about the
politics of those who have decided to wear the
mask. Words have the power to disrupt, to
destroy as well as to decay.
The poet as
gardener must have the skill to plant and the
patience to wait for things to bloom. Yes, there
can be a spring, but it requires hard work on
bending knees. I want to be the type of poet who
maintains a closeness to the earth. I want to
celebrate what Whitman once celebrated. After
all the civil wars inside our hearts, we must
accept nothing less. I want to hear America
singing once again. I want to dance to the new
music.
This article appeared in the
March 15, 2010 edition of
TheNation.
* * * * *
Remembering King
and The 'Fierce Urgency Of Now'
By E. Ethelbert Miller
|
Martin Luther King Jr. may be best remembered for his "I
Have a Dream" moment, but too often overlooked are his
efforts to fight poverty in America. Essayist E. Ethelbert
Miller says that this Monday, we should remember King in his
full context. His messages are relevant even — or especially
— in 2010. |
Back in the old days of vinyl
albums and those sweet 45s, there was often a flip side of a hit song
that you wanted to dance to more than anything else. It was the side not
played on the radio but instead hummed perhaps during the privacy of
one's shower.
When I listen to Martin Luther
King's "I Have a Dream" speech, I'm always curious as to why many of us
overlook the opening statements of his 1963 address. It's as if we only
hear one side of his speech. Why do we quickly repeat the words "I have
a dream," and not the words "America has given the Negro people a bad
check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.' But we refuse to
believe the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there
are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this
nation."
The fierce urgency of now is what
Martin Luther King mentioned back in 1963. But how long is now?
I feel these words by King are also
inspiring. King spoke of a debt before he spoke of the dream. This is
important to remember because it shows his focus on economic conditions
and problems in America. King was concerned not only with fighting
segregation and discrimination, but also with fighting poverty. During
his last year he was organizing a poor people's campaign to come to
Washington, D.C.
It was the labor demands of
sanitation workers that encouraged him to travel to Memphis in 1968.
King knew it took hard work to fulfill a dream.
In 2010, poverty can disguise
itself by hiding behind unemployment lines, housing foreclosures and the
inability of a young person to afford a college education. When we look
around our nation, many businesses are suffering from insufficient
funds, as are too many families.
Once again, we wonder if the great
vaults of America are still rich with opportunities for everyone.
The "fierce urgency of now" is what
King mentioned back in 1963. But how long is "now"? Every year we cling
dearly to the last lines of King's speech — because of their poetic
beauty. King's words echo those of Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. I
believe he heard America singing.
Our hearts today are too large to simply contain
sorrow songs and blues. In 2010, we need to know which side of the
record is playing — the dream or the debt. When we celebrate King's
birthday, we shouldn't just remember and examine one speech. The man,
the minister, the prophet is too complex for that. Yet his "I Have a
Dream" speech should be understood in its entirety. Next to his
speeches, we should place his sermons. Here we will find King's
compassion for his fellow man. Here we will continue to discover words
that will provide us with the strength to love.
January 17, 2010
* * * * *
|
After
the War and After the Rain
(for Daniela Ponce)
By
E. Ethelbert Miller
It is always raining somewhere—
And widows stand in front of windows
watching it fall.
They wait for husbands and sons and
lovers to return.
They hold rosaries and flowers, and
they wait for love to bloom (again).
But it is raining and the earth is
wet and the politicians and soldiers
walk across the earth turning
everything to mud, and there is mud
on
everyone's shoes and boots and the
world is dirty and in need of a
kiss.
The widows talk to the rain with
tears on their tongues.
The widows speak the language of
memory.
When they turn away from the windows
they walk across the room and
undress. They place their garments
of mourning on their beds. The
widows
hope their black clothes will go to
sleep and maybe dream (again). In
dreams
the sun is always walking down the
street, laughing and playing a flute
of
light. The light strikes shoes and
sandals and everything starts to
glow
(again). In dreams the widows are
young girls who have just discovered
their
smiles. The terror of death has not
been born. There is no sound of war
marching. There is only dancing
everywhere on the earth. It is
raining
somewhere else. It is raining
outside our dreams.
16 September 2005 |
Torture?
We've been hearing a lot about waterboarding
over the last year, but we rarely have any
detail about exactly what it is or how it works.
Watch this amazing video done by a reporter for
Playboy who decided to see if he could last 15
seconds of waterboarding.
HuffingtonPost
When
Guppies eat their President:
The question of torture is getting a lot of
attention in the media. Finally something to bog
the Obama Administration down in. Look for the
Democrats to make a mess out of this issue and
lose control of government once again. Could you
see this coming? Yep. Just go back to all those
posters during the anti-war protests that wanted
to convict Bush and Company for being war
criminals. Throw some torture in front of this
political lion and we are talking bones in the
mouth.
This is not 24 and Jack Bauer's day in front of
Congress—this
is the US government during a time of economic
crisis. Who from the Bush Administration are we
going to punish? Are we going to place Bush, or
Rice behind bars? The US nation was attacked on
9/11. Yes, I wanted the New England Patriots to
win the Super bowl, but I'm not going to go back
and say Eli Manning was in the grasp of a
defender and so we have to change the score of
the game. The game is over—and
so is the Bush Administration. Leave the lessons
and the judgments to historians and not Congress
or President Obama. If we fail to do this, we
will once again divide this nation around issues
of patriotism. That's a no win situation. Game
over.
E. Ethelbert Miller
* * * * *
August Wilson's RADIO GOLF
I went down to
The Studio Theatre last night. They are presenting
August Wilson's RADIO GOLF. Wilson continues to be
my favorite writer. In my home office I keep a
picture of him, novelist Charles Johnson and myself.
The photograph was taken in Seattle. Wilson had come
to a poetry reading I was giving. Afterwards, we
went out for a night of long conversations...
RADIO GOLF is
the play Wilson completed in 2005, just a few months
before his death. It's the last play in his legacy
of ten plays about the African American experience.
They are all set in Pittsburgh. This last play is
very timely. It's about gentrification and a young
black man running for mayor. How ironic to see Mayor
Fenty's parents in the front row. Before the play
begin I chatted with the mayor's father. I still
cherish the beautiful letter he wrote me after he
read my memoir FATHERING WORDS. I told him there was
a sequel - THE 5TH INNING, and I would present him
with a copy later this week.
In the play
RADIO GOLF is my favorite actor/friend Fred Strother.
He plays the "Elder" Joseph Barlow. This is
Strother's play. When he is on stage he brings the
electricity the same way those Buffalo Bill
offensive lineman once blocked for OJ (the juice).
Wilson's language is built for an actor like
Strother. Here is Wilson at his creative best - Old
Joe's words near the beginning of RADIO GOLF:
America is
a giant slot machine. You walk up and put in your
coin and it spits it back out. You look at your
coin. You think maybe it's a Canadian quarter. It's
the only coin you got. If this coin ain't no good
then you out of luck. You look at it and sure enough
it's an American quarter. But it don't spend for
you. It spend for everybody else but it don't spend
for you. The machine spits it right back out. Is the
problem with the quarter or with the machine?
E. Ethelbert Miller 25 May 2009
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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
* *
* * 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 *
* * * 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
*
* * * *
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
* * *
*
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
* *
* * *
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:
|
George Washington University (Gelman
Library)
Emory & Henry College
University of Minnesota |
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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|
|
Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
*
* * * *
|
Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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update 2 August 2008
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