Stephen Paul Miller's new poetry collection has just released and is now available on Amazon. We than Lehman Weichselbaum for his review below.
The Portable Stephen Paul Miller
By Lehman Weichselbaum
Beautiful Snacks is a book you can take anywhere. It's the rare work that wraps the lightest possible read around matters that travel the full distance up and down the scale of consequence. You can read it between plays when you take your kid to the next Mets game. Like the game of baseball itself, the poems here alternate simmery moments that could matter (depending on the next pitch) with ringing moments that actually do (the batter hits or plays out). Either way, the game or the page never loses your willing captivity.
You can read it on your next flight to far coasts and skip the headphones. Like air travel, Miller's verbal nosh straps you into a negligible run of miles over an earth that mysteriously augments its reality the more it takes on the raiments of a dream. You'll finish it by the Plains States. Be sure to multiply the highs with a well-earned sample from the drinks cart. A light rye and a dark fruit juice with just enough ice would be our choice.
Miller traffics in the low-giggle archness of the New York School (of which he is a forthright self-admitted member) while at the same time pouring a wealth of emotional heart into his scattered-line caesura, ever-attentive chatter (in that sense more O'Hara, Schuyler, and Koch than Ashbery). Like all good-standing New York Schoolers, and like John Cage (a friend and collaborator), when it comes to subject matter Miller shuns all hierarchies of inclusivity and lets it all in. He joins his forays into "pure" language, earnest frivolity and historical speculation with warm and searching reminisces of family and friends, as well as touches of old-school lyricism ("The fiddle sways and/its profile shows/each note to be a detail/of its soft and/ infinite garden."). So on random days he'll be ruminating on Busby Berkeley, the connection between Hitler and the Beatles, the origins of the ancient Israelites, TV's "The Honeymooners," the other (evil Trumpite) Stephen Miller, a walking talking Halloween, his Staten Island pharmacy-owning parents, FDR (Miller wrote a straight-up biography of New Deal Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins) and Meher Baba (Miller's spiritual guide.) Pound for pound all are equal in the poet's eye.
What else in Miller's overstuffed, weightless as Wheat Thins travel bag?
Merry rounds of name dropping ("I'm not sure why. Does my not-greatness highlight their greatness?"): (The aforementioned) John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Langston Hughes, Jackie Mason, Bill Clinton, Gilbert Price, Sandra Bernhard, Philip Glass, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jasper Johns and (his personal one-man stock company from his absurdist playwrighting days) Taylor Mead.
Drop-in one-liner "monostiches" ("You don't get older, you just put on layers," "Hiawatha rises above Longfellow's poetry," "Everything coming to you will get there.").
A class-based economics treatise, "Flight of the Physiocrats," posing as a full-length one act play (performed at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2019).
And, distilling everything he is and does in a kernel of shopkeeper's wisdom: "I'm personally/ and idiosyncratically producing the/ written word the way my father did a/drug store."
The poet brings it. Anywhere you go. Lots of freight, small baggage. A picnic, the ski lodge, the shore ("Just a purple line/a beach feeling/bad and hopeful...").
