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The Company of Poets
by Carolyn Miller

Carolyn Miller, author of After Cocteau, is a painter, freelance writer, and book editor. She has published poems and short stories, and has taught college classes in creative writing. Miller has published in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, and The Southern Review, among other magazines. Protean Press has published two collections of Miller's poetry: Constant Lover, a letterpress limited-edition, and a chapbook, The Reluctant Dinner Guest. Her poetry has received several honors, including the James Boatwright III Award for Poetry from Shenandoah and the Rainmaker Award from Zone 3. She leads writing workshops in San Francisco and Mallorca, Spain.

Years ago, when I worked at a small publishing company in Berkeley, California, and was trying to become a poet, another, much younger woman who worked at the same place won an important local poetry contest. When I mentioned to our shipper, a poet closer to my age (the Bay Area is a hotbed of poets), how wonderful it was that she had found success at such an early age, he looked at me with surprise. "It's easy to be a young poet, " he said.

His remark stayed with me as I continued to try to write and publish. I have remembered it all this time, along with the fact that after Herman Melville died, a scrap of paper was found fastened to the underside of his desk. "Be true to the dreams of your youth," it said.

I believe that we are unfaithful to the dreams of our youth at our great peril, and that the unfulfilled desires of our younger selves can make our older selves angry, bitter, and resentful. And I believe that a need to be creative is built into humans, and that when we deny that need, we live incomplete lives.

As a child, the world of words called to me, and I wrote poems all through grade school, high school, and college. I stopped writing while I was married (which led me to another one of my beliefs: If your partner does not support and encourage your creative life, he or she is probably not your ideal partner), then began again as a single mother. I wrote and published a few poems in the women's literary journals that flowered in the '70s, but then I lost momentum. I wasn't writing and I wasn't publishing. I wasn't a poet.

That was when I learned two more important things: If you want to do something, you have to make a commitment to it. And you must surround yourself with other people who want to do the same thing.

These ideas seem obvious now. But it wasn't until I attended my first poetry conference that I understood the depth of commitment successful writers have to make. I went to the first Napa Valley Poetry Conference in 1980 (it has now become the Napa Valley Writing Conference), and was amazed at how much more poetry seemed to mean to the faculty than it did to me. All of them taught poetry for a living; indeed, poetry was their life. They knew its long history, and they knew the work of poets who were their contemporaries, in this country and around the world, and they knew the work of emerging poets. They had written and published and taught for years. I realized that while these people had been studying and practicing their craft, almost 20 years had gone by since I had taken a poetry workshop or class.

That conference was the true beginning of my poetry life, because it was there that I met another woman from San Francisco and the two of us decided to start a writing group. I had never considered doing so until then; because I had always thought of myself as a writer (whether or not I was writing), I assumed that I didn't need a group. But the powerful experience of attending a week-long conference with almost 100 other people who loved poetry and wanted to write it made me understand that if I wanted to be a poet, I needed to be in the company of poets.

The writing group that Jeanne Lohmann and I started in 1981 still exists. Jeanne has moved to Olympia, Washington, and started another group there; I am the only original member of the San Francisco group, though two other members have belonged for almost as many years. Our group waxes and wanes; sometimes we meet only once a month instead of twice, and sometimes only two or three of us can meet, but it is because of this group that I am still writing poetry.

More than 10 years ago my writing group started another, larger, group, this one devoted to new writing rather than critiquing work brought into each session. We call it the "solstice group," because we meet four times a year on or near the solstices and equinoxes, and we run our own all-day poetry workshops, bringing in writing exercises and writing together on the spot. Several of us also lead workshops for other people, based on the same model. It's simple: A new-writing workshop is a way to give yourself time, space, and permission to focus on your writing in a way you might never otherwise do in your too-busy life.

In 1999, seven of us who were involved in the solstice group started yet another group: a collective publishing company known as Sixteen Rivers Press. Although all of us had published in literary journals, and several of us had books to our credit, we were all frustrated by the continuing difficulty of finding publishers for our work. In the last two years, we've published four books. We have four more on our publishing schedule, including one by our newest member, who was chosen by an open submission process. Our vision for the press is that it will flow on, riverlike, as the founding members drop out over time and the newer members continue publishing and bringing in more Bay Area poets. I owe my book, After Cocteau, to this press.

In a larger sense, I owe both my book and my somewhat-difficult existence as a no-longer-young poet to the company of poets. I recommend such like-minded company to all those who want to be true to the dreams of their youth -- or to fulfill any new dreams that might come calling.

Suggested Books

• The Practice of Poetry, Robin Behn and Chase Twitchell, eds.
• The Poet's Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux
• In the Palm of Your Hand, Steve Kowit
• Art and Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland

After Cocteau

Poetry Interviews and More:

• Eleanor Lerman
• Simone Muench
• Paul Muldoon
• Charles Rafferty
• Hiromi Goto
• Sixteen Rivers Press
• More poetry

Browse Archived Interviews
Browse Archived Excerpts

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