front cover of From the Valley of Bronze Camels
From the Valley of Bronze Camels
A Primer, Some Lectures, & A Boondoggle on Poetry
Jane Miller
University of Michigan Press, 2022

Jane Miller loves poetry. In these provocative and deeply insightful essays, she unpacks the work of giants like Adrienne Rich, Paul Celan, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and Federico García Lorca alongside painters such as Caravaggio and Paul Klee, as well as ancient Chinese music and techniques of the contemporary poem. Miller explores the use of the question mark in the history of poetry and its function as a revelation of poetic voice. She considers the positive and negative aspects of surrealism on the contemporary poem, its anti-feminist origins in France, its contemporary usage, and the benefits of super-real images. Miller examines how identity politics might affect the imagination. She describes ancient Chinese musical instruments to show how their sounds resonate off/in American poems and on the aural integrity of the lyric poem. She interrogates the political implications of language and the degeneration and regeneration of words. Finally, in an essay about what she dares not say about poetry, she comes out against forms of surrealism, narrative, jargon, rhetoric, irony, and appropriation. This masterful work can be read as advice to a young writer, but it also invites us into the mind of a writer who has developed her craft through the course of a lifetime of writing, reading, and exploring the world, showing not only the ideas that influenced her—feminist, lesbian, and international works—but also how Miller has, in turn, influenced ideas.

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logo for Harvard University Press
Seductions
Studies in Reading and Culture
Jane Miller
Harvard University Press, 1991

front cover of Working Time
Working Time
Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel
Jane Miller
University of Michigan Press, 1992
Working Time collects essays by prize-winning poet Jane Miller on the subjects of poetry, travel, and culture. The discussions of contemporary poetry begin with excursions into geography, where language literally “takes shape.” Each essay is set in a landscape, where the notion of travel as a poetic experience, from the American Southwest to places in Italy, France, and Spain, is explored.
 
The essays consider notions of time, duration, narrative, documentary, and history in American poetry, and view poetry in the light of developments in feminism, postmodern theory, and contemporary poetic practice. In addition to poetry, Miller investigates a range of cultural products and art forms, including film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, music, and the Madonna phenomenon.
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