Carolyn Miller: California Poets Part 8, Four Poems

Carolyn Miller

January 8th, 2025

California Poets: Part VIII

Carolyn Miller

Four Poems

Hell

Hell is other people.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

People who ride bicycles on the sidewalk.

People who ride bicycles in the crosswalks.

People on bicycles who don’t stop for red lights.

People who let their dogs run on the sidewalk without a leash.

People on bicycles on the sidewalk with dogs that aren’t on a leash.

People who don’t clean up after their dogs.

People who let their dogs pee on trees and bushes and flowers.

People in groups who block the sidewalk, with or without their dogs.

People who talk really loud on their cell phones while walking right behind me.

People who talk on cell phones in public places.

People who let their cell phones ring in yoga class.

People on bicycles on the sidewalk talking on cell phones.

People who talk really loud in restaurants, with or without a cell phone.

People in giant SUVs.

People in giant SUVs who talk on cell phones while turning the corner when I’m

     in the crosswalk.

People who do rolling stops in their giant SUVs when I’m in the crosswalk.

People who drive their giant SUVs really fast and then brake suddenly at the last

     minute when I’m in the crosswalk.

People who stand in the doorways when riding the bus.

People who do not take their giant backpacks off when riding the bus.

People who play rap music anywhere I can hear it, especially in the apartment

     next door.

People who don’t sweep the sidewalk in front of their house.

People who put garbage in the recycling bin.

People who don’t like French people. Or anyone who is different from them.

People who are bitter that their life didn’t turn out the way they thought it

     would.

People who are still mad at their parents.

People who complain all the time.

Untitled, 2001 (No. 2)

after a painting by Cy Twombly

Wasn’t it like that then, color falling

from the sky, blobs and globs of joy

streaming in the air, tears and laughter

coming into being and exulting in

the summer light, summer by the sea,

a table laden with roses and ripe figs, everything

rising to some peak of happiness, the world

singing with it, being born over and over in

the full flush of existence—and won’t it be

like that again, one more time,

pink and crimson and rose and gold,

falling and blossoming in

the shimmering light?

Missouri, Summer, 1948

when you could look up at night and see

the Milky Way floating above you, a vast,

mysterious cloud of stars, part of your life,

like the leg pains that made your mother

have to get up in the middle of the night

and wrap your legs with hot, wet towels

while your father fumed in their room below.

Part of your life, like your dog, Sparky,

who ran free without collar or license

or leash or fence, sucking eggs down

in the holler and bringing home huge bones

from slaughtered hogs. And the Big Dipper,

enormous, spread out across the darkness,

pointing to the North Star in the handle of

the Little Dipper, and Venus, the trembling

Evening Star you wished on every night

as darkness deepened. And the elusive,

theatrical moon, changing shape each night,

swelling and growing, shrinking and

disappearing and reappearing in different places

at different times in the sky, the sky that was

so much closer then, when the swarms of stars

and the wandering planets and friendly

constellations were bigger and shone brighter.

Where are they now, I wonder, where have they gone,

the stars, the spotted dog, the years?

Grocery-Store Tulips

Even wrinkled, these

red-green-purple tulips are

beautiful. Even as they die,

sprawling in the green glass vase,

their petals, streaked

with all the colors

of the Northern Lights,

keep on thinning like old silk,

and the dark stars

of their interiors

grow visible through

the layers of

their bell-like cups.

Now, their petals close

against the California light

to hide their fleshy

three-lobed stamens and

their fierce black stigmas

and their faint, almost

exhausted, bitter scent.

Even now they reach

a fatal glory

on this table

in my kitchen where

all the wars

are far away, even as

the earth’s crust

keeps on shifting in

April’s changing light.

Interview

November 16th, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

Carolyn Miller, Poet, Editor, Painter

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: The idea that writing entails a collective enterprise is a fascinating idea and one you take to heart. Over the years writing groups have constituted a big part of your success as a writer. When and how did you realize that they were indispensable for your poetic development?

CM: I started writing poetry in grade school and continued through high school and then at the University of Missouri, publishing poems in the English Department poetry journal (Midlands, a stapled little student-run magazine and a precursor to The Missouri Review) and winning a poetry prize from that journal. I moved to San Francisco from Colorado as a single mother with two young children in l970 and began publishing a few poems in little magazines at some point in that decade, though I was not part of the poetry community.

In 1981, I attended the first Napa Valley Poetry Conference (today called the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, for both poetry and prose), which changed my life. Not only did I study with Bob Hass and read in public for the first time, I met many other nationally known and local poets, including a lively older woman named Janet Carncross Chandler, who said to me briskly at lunch, “Do you have a poetry group?” When I said no, she said, “Well, why not?” So when I met Jeanne Lohmann and learned that she also lived in San Francisco, I asked her if she wanted to be part of a poetry group and she said yes.

We started by meeting twice a month at Jeanne’s house on Tenth Avenue, and other local poets we had met at the Napa Conference and elsewhere (including Susan Sibbet, Jacqueline Kudler, Diane Lutovich, Terry Ehret, Margaret Kaufman, and Valerie Berry) joined us. We brought new poems for critique, beginning with positive comments and giving each person fifteen to twenty minutes per session. We met at the same time every month, from 10 to 12 on Sunday mornings. We slowly learned how to critique and revise our own work as well as that of others. And we encouraged one another to keep reading and writing poetry.

We met at Jeanne’s house for years, until she moved to Olympia, Washington, when we relocated to Susan Sibbet’s house on Sixteenth Avenue. Many different poets dropped into and out of the group, almost all women, though an occasional brave man appeared. And the group still exists today, though it meets only once a month, and I am the only original member.

Having a poetry group proved to be essential to my continuing to write and to develop my writing. As a single mother working full-time, I almost surely would not have been able to keep writing without the deadlines of group meetings and the community of my poet friends. I know for certain that I would not have written nearly as many poems on my own.

DG: The segue into Sixteen Rivers Press seems natural here. Can you talk about your role in the creation of the publishing collective along with the impetus that led to it?

CM: Not only did the poetry group critique new work brought in for each meeting, we encouraged one another to send out individual poems for publication, to create poetry manuscripts and enter book contests, and to attend other writing conferences. After a few years, a certain amount of disillusionment about the efficacy of poetry conferences set in, and we decided to have our own poetry conferences by meeting four times a year for day-long leaderless writing workshops. In alignment with our California Gaia consciousness, we agreed to meet four times a year at the solstices and equinoxes. Our plan for what we called “the solstice group” was to meet at 10 a.m. on a Sunday, bringing our own bag lunches, a poem by someone other than ourselves to read to the group, and a poetry exercise. We wrote new work on the spot (for 15 to 20 minutes) and shared it with the group, though we also had the option to not share if we wanted. This generated first drafts to work on later to bring to the regular bimonthly poetry group for critique. What is more important, responding to sample poems and writing exercises allowed us to create work that was often more experimental, more daring, more surprising, and more unlike our other work by accessing our subconscious minds in the act of free writing.

Like the regular poetry group, which today meets on Zoom, the solstice group is still meeting today, now in person at Nina Lindsay’s house in Oakland.

After a few years of meeting with the solstice group, we began to discuss the problem of getting our work published in book form. We had duly created and re-created manuscripts and submitted them to contests with little luck. At one solstice meeting, Terry Ehret broached the radical idea of creating our own publishing company to publish our work and that of other Bay Area poets. Because I was working for a small publishing company called 101 Productions in San Francisco at that time and thought I knew all about publishing, I promptly declared that starting and running a publishing company would be more work than anybody in the group could possibly imagine, something we simply couldn’t pull off. And as we gradually began to do exactly that, I became known as the “resident cynic,” even as I took part in that venture.

We began with seven founders, all women and all part of the solstice group at that time (Valerie Berry, Terry Ehret, Margaret Kaufman, Jacqueline Kudler, Diane Lutovitch, Susan Sibbet, and me). Twenty-six years later, only three of the co-founders are still living, and the press has published more than seventy books, including ours as well as those of many other poets, who are now drawn from all of Northern California.

DG: Visual art, specifically painting, also plays a large part in your creative life. To what extent did your writing change when you picked up the brush and does the poetic line influence how you compose on the canvas?

CM: I don’t believe my writing changed once I started painting, and I don’t think the poetic line influences my visual work. But much of my writing and painting is drawn from the natural world, and my goal is to try to create work that is alive on the page and the canvas.

DG: I’m fascinated by your editorial activities, in particular your efforts in designing poetry books. Astute poets and their readers can tell a good collection by what’s between the pages, but the matter is rarely as simple as that. The book is always judged as a whole. Thus, apart from perfect, or nearly perfect poems, what else, in terms of design, makes a collection ideal in your view?

CM: My first concern is a readable typeface in a readable size. I see so many books with very small type these days, which I think is a disservice to both the author and the reader, especially in regards to poetry. My favorite typeface and size is 12-point Adobe Garamond Pro. I like to drop the text for the second page (and any following pages) of a poem down to align with the first line of the first page of the poem rather than “hanging it from the top,” as is so often done. And I like to center the entire body of the poem on the page, so that the text is not crammed over onto the left side of both the right- and left-hand pages. I try to end the right-hand page of a poem of more than one page with a line that does not end with a period, so the reader will know it’s not the last line of the poem. And when the last page of a poem is short on text, I try to jiggle the setting of the poem so that there are at least five lines on that page so the page doesn’t look so bare. I sometimes use the display type from the cover as the type for the poem titles. Finally, I use a medium-weight “natural,” or ivory-colored paper, recycled if possible, rather than white paper.

DG: You’ve taught poetry and composition courses in different contexts. What are the most rewarding aspects of teaching and what have been the challenges?

CM: My first teaching experience was at a Catholic girls’ college (that’s what they were called then) when I was just out of college myself, and decided teaching was not for me. I did teach another semester at a community college years later, which was a better fit, but I am much more comfortable leading writing workshops with older adults, which I have done in the years since then. I’ve led several such workshops in France and Spain, and am currently leading a workshop (now on Zoom) that grew out of one of the France workshops and has been ongoing since 2006! In that role, I see myself as first and foremost as an encourager, rather than an instructor.

DG: In addition to teaching you also do private consultations for poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. Are authors mostly receptive to changes and what’s the best way to give critique—to put emphasis on the positives or to try and resolve as many problems as possible?

CM: My work with private clients is not really consultations but a close editing of a manuscript, a combination of line editing, or copyediting (correcting grammar, syntax, punctuation, etc.) and content editing (organization and development of ideas, arrangement and choice of poems, etc.). I believe that poetry needs both line editing and content editing as much as prose.

DG: Prose is also a part of your repertoire. Do you still think in terms of the line when writing a sentence or does the narrative take precedence?

CM: I don’t think of the line when writing prose (except to vary the length of sentences when possible). I believe poetry is defined by its difference from prose and distinguished by its embrace of lineation, music, and figurative language, all of which is what I love about poetry.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

CM: I do a lot of designing and copyediting for Sixteen Rivers, and I’ve just finished designing Random Universe, my third book for the press, which will be published in 2026. I’m adding some new poems to a new manuscript (Spring Branch, River) and sending it out to small presses. I have a few more essays to write for a manuscript of creative nonfiction that I want to send out, and a finished novel and an opera libretto that are looking for homes! And I continue to submit poems for publication in poetry journals.

Author Bio:

Carolyn Miller is a poet, painter, and freelance book editor living in San Francisco. Her most recent book of poetry is Route 66 and Its Sorrows (Terrapin Books, 2017). Two earlier books, Light, Moving (2009) and After Cocteau (2002), were published by Sixteen Rivers Press. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, ONE ART, SALT, and Smartish Pace, among other journals, and her awards include the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry from Shenandoah and the Rainmaker Award from Zone 3.