Skinny Eighth Avenue is as packed, fleet, worldly, busy and exhilarating as any New York thoroughfare, neither cute nor particularly skinny, a hurtling and compelling book to breathe life into an airless afternoon.—Joyelle McSweeney, The Constant Critic
Breezy and flip, but never arch, Stephen Paul Miller’s poems are engaging and inventive….Contemporary culture, especially politics, is embraced. George Bush is a major protagonist. In play-like scenarios we’re introduced to John Gotti, Marilyn Monroe and Van McCoy who wrote “The Hustle.” Like Pound and Ginsberg, Miller takes on the real world, leavening it with surrealist tropes and disarming asides.....Miller laces his writing with talk, bringing forth the full power of language....We have become the muse and are inspired by our transformation. —Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Brooklyn Rail
On The Bee Flies In May
“There's a new air in the fast-talking quality of these poems, which go beyond "New York School" casualness and beyond O'Hara's stylized "Personism". They break even recent protocols of diction and form. Miller's work is compendium, a collage, conversation, telegrammed, all-inclusive. The reader rushes on—quickened, a participant—into the "silly" games, into history, into illuminations. Miller retrieves history from unspeakable despair, as he perceives it, in disorder. Without rhetoric, he honors survival and illuminates his sense of humanity. Humor is humane. Every child knows how to live in the "four worlds" (of games, eternity, breakfast, animal dream, persons, sky, witches, blankets, water, hands:—choose 4!) But many people have locked doors, lose the way. This collection shows how Miller has kept many worlds active.”—Sidereality
“An amazing synthesis of experimental and narrative modes. An astonishing creative and critical force. Stephen Paul Miller is the most radical poet-critic I know.”—David Shapiro
"If Walt Whitman had taken a Ph.D. in literary theory at New York University in the 1980s, and then wrote poetry, the outcome might have resembled The Bee Flies in May. Following John Barth, Miller has constructed a funhouse: his musings refract images that contain fascinating, funny, and surreal moments of perception, but vision is distorted, twisted, sometimes made minuscule, other times writ large, and then expanded out of any proportion. Miller is not Whitman, but he is a Wit-man. Both are poets who have written large period pieces that signify their awareness of America in crucial times.” —Daniel Morris
“Miller’s mind is exactly the kind of soft, self-perpetuating machine that you want to access when your own is running out of juice.” —Andrew Ross
Miller makes cultural comparisons that are equal parts genius and madness. —San Francisco Chronicle
Miller closes a mysterious missing gap in American cultural history.—Utne Reader
Miller's lesson is about an interpretive methodology teaching us to listen to things we had not heard before.—Andrew Ross, American Literature
Stephen Paul Miller is a New York City poet and playwright. He is the author of three books of poems, The Bee Flies In May, That Man Who Ground Moths Into Film and Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam, and a Backwoods Broadside. He is also author of The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance. He co-edited the NPF Scene of My Selves: New Work On the New York School Poets, which stresses poetry's relationship to painting. He has had gallery shows at PS1 and William Paterson's Ben Shawn Gallery in New York City
ISBN 0-9759197-1-7 $15.00 |
