« Back to Excerpts

On Jim Wayne Miller's The Brier Poems

Deborah Bogen

Jim Wayne Miller, a much admired writer and well-loved teacher, died in 1996. The Brier Poems, which includes poems from two of Miller’s earlier books (The Mountains Have Come Closer and Brier, His Book) as well as previously unpublished poems was brought out by Gnomon Press in 1997.

Miller was both a poet and a translator, but he was most well known and appreciated for his Appalachia-centered writing. Today he would likely be designated a “regional poet” and in fact his delicate evocations of Appalachian ecology (“One cricket in dead grass chirps, Bitter...bitter”) might even qualify him as a “bio-regionalist.” But to someone who enters Miller’s writing through The Brier Poems he is first and foremost a poet-storyteller and the story he is telling while deeply informed by his attachment to Appalachia, transcends locale. The “Brier poems” tell stories of migration, alienation, searching and homecoming. In the course of the telling Miller is revealed as a poet who is most interested in moments that are at once familiar and foreign, secular and spiritual. The landscape he loves and wrestles with is not only Brier country with its “smokehouse, barn, garden palings, cistern and windlass” (pg 107) glory, but also the inner landscape of a thoughtful man who “feels no one sees the one he’s become.”

Since The Brier Poems includes Miller’s earlier work as well as his final poems, and since it is built around the geography, imagery and concerns which were central to his life as a poet, I am going to treat this book as a “collected works.” In a “Publisher’s Note” editor, Jonathan Greene, tells us that he and Miller had anticipated the project for many years. Greene says the editing of this volume was done “in the spirit of the past”, i.e., in a way, and with priorities, he hopes would please Miller. Greene’s editing certainly demonstrates a deep feeling for Miller’s writing. The ordering and layout of the poems feels natural, unrushed and complete, as if the editor appreciated the complexity of Miller’s project and wanted to give him room to work it all out.

This is a collection in which the poems talk to each other. Miller is concerned with the state of the Brier soul and uses the poems to trace an evolution which includes a homecoming—but it is a homecoming of a particular sort. The Brier who returns is not the Brier who left. In fact the final lines of the last poem, “In the darkness of his senses, a spiritual frog, he didn’t desire the kiss of an eastern princess to translate him into a noble soul” (pg 159) speak directly to an early Briar incarnation who “lived like a frog in my pockets./In a black forest/a lost girl came and kissed him into a handsome prince.” (pg 23)

The book opens with a “Note on Brier” which alerts the reader to Miller’s fixation on his main character’s roots and symbolic place in the American landscape. “North of the Ohio river, migrants from the southern Appalachians are known as Briers. Any of several prickly plants, the Brier is in another sense the quintessential Appalachian.” Here Miller establishes the ambiguous nature of his central imagery. “Brier” can be read as at least potentially pejorative, or as an iconic pointer to a sort of American hero—the mountain man. This ambiguity is expressly called out in Miller’s long poem “Brier’s Sermon.” He cites America’s assessment of the Brier populace this way (pg. 70)

They said, You’re proud and independent.
They said, You’re narrow-minded.
They said, You’re the heart of America.
They said, You’re the worst part of America.
They said, We ought to be more like you.
They said, You ought to be more like us.

Oddly, this specific depiction of the Appalachian’s experience moving into America’s cities is what universalizes Miller’s poems. Rural citizenry immigrating to the city has long experienced what Miller describes, a confusing cocktail of admiration based largely on a romantic view of American rural values coupled with a disdain for the rustic’s lack of intellectual training and social sophistication. This ambivalence reinforces a strong split in the heart and mind of the Brier himself who wants to cherish and respect the positive aspects of mountain life while responding to the lure of the bookish life of scholarship. So Miller writes poems with titles like “Brier Riddle”, “The Brier Losing Touch with His Traditions”, “The Brier Reviewing Novels”, “He Sings Ballads”, “The Brier Moves to a New Place”, “Brier Coming of Age “, “The Brier’s Pictorial History of the Mountains”, “Brier Ambassador” and “The Brier at Books.” In these poems we find a poet who has an almost compulsive need to confess how far he has traveled from his Brier roots and who feels the journey has both enriched and imperiled him. His need to absorb intellectual knowledge may lead him to the “seed that could transform his doggy life”(“The Brier at Books”, pg 152) but it may also result in a dangerous forgetting. In “Written on the Land” (pg. 107) we see that this fear is not trivial for the mountain man who wants always to be able to read the Brier landscape with a native’s grace. He takes serious note of those who come to Appalachia with the wherewithal to renovate its treasures and who end parroting local speech and custom. Miller closes this poem with the admonition that “the stones are a crux no one can interpret/who comes weekends in a power boat to write /laughter and happy endings on blue water.”

As we will see, distrust of happy endings is a serious matter to Miller, but first I want to take a look at one of Miller’s poem that perhaps exemplifies his preoccupation with the risks of his physical, intellectual and emotional travels, and focus on what is successful and what is problematic in his handling of this material. The Poem is “Turn Your Radio On” (pg 25) and I will quote it here in its entirety:

Turn Your Radio On


				I

	He couldn’t hear his own thoughts in the city that never slept.
	Like a voice on a far-off radio station, his thoughts rose
	and fell in a storm of static. The city’s rush and roar
	even poured through his dreams, boiling up like a waterfall.

	Asleep or awaking, he tried to keep a sense of direction south.
	Lying awake in the smoky carbon darkness of northern nights,
	facing east, he kept a knowledge, like a book under his pillow,
	that the mountains lay to his right, beyond the mills and
		warehouses.

	But sometimes he’d come awake in darkness and find the room
	had turned in the slow current of his sleep. He would not rest
	again until he’d righted the room, and sleep was drifting
	away from the waterfall’s roar toward the quietness of mountains.

	But he never drifted home before he woke. He felt so stilled
	inside, a breathing silence. It was as if his thoughts had been
	a friend, a buddy who went everywhere with him. Now he
	turned and found that old companion hadn’t followed him here.

				II

	Sometimes he’d sit for hours looking through a shoebox
	of family photographs: his grandfather leading a pair of Walker
	foxhounds; the old man atop  a boulder in the Bearwallow
	holding his squirrel gun like a walking stick, or on the porch

	with his grandmother, both of them sitting in split-bottom chairs.
	Weathered and homemade like the chairs they sat in,
		and like the house
	and barn, so comfortably in place, they looked like one another.
	Something about the way they sat spoke to him through his 
		own thoughts

	all the way from the mountains, like a powerful transmitter:
		this place
	belongs to us, their faces said, and we belong to it.
	When it’s time, we come out on this porch and take our ease,
	and talk, as naturally as tree frogs in the poplars sing toward dark.

What Miller gives us here is a description of the displaced mountain character who’s come to “the city” which the poem dismisses as noisy and apparently largely uninteresting (it is not a specific city, with particular sounds—rather it’s all “rush and roar” and “storm of static”). The Brier (for surely this is the Brier) is asleep, or trying to sleep, but bothered by this undifferentiated city interference. The first stanza is full of quickly identifiable language and image—the Brier can’t hear his own thoughts, the city never sleeps, his thoughts are like a voice on a far-off radio, the city rushes and roars.

But in the second stanza something interesting happens. The Brier “asleep or waking” tries to stay oriented to the south and he seems to use his very body as the compass. He holds on to the knowledge “that the mountains lay to his right”. In the third stanza we learn that he sometimes loses track of “home” but that with effort (“he would not rest again until...”) he can re-orient himself. This sort of directional orienting has echoes of religious practice (facing east to pray or the various stations of the cross which are laid out directionally) and takes us back to the poem’s title “Turn Your Radio On” with its old-timey gospel call to stay tuned in to your spiritual home. The rest of this first half is a poignant statement of power and helplessness. The Brier is able through an act of will to “right the room” so that sleep drifts away from the city noise and toward the mountain’s quiet, but can never get all the way home. He finds that his very thoughts, which he characterizes as friend and companion, refuse to follow him on his odyssey.

The second section of the poem finds the speaker trying to get those thoughts, that sense of being connected, back. Here again Miller employs pictorial description (in fact he has his character looking through a box of photos) and he gives us what is at once an image of connectedness and one of distance—his tie to his grandparents. Grandparent imagery is typical of the writer who is one generation removed from life on the land. It can be useful but it’s dangerous, since grandparents are easily romanticized. Miller gives us a picture of his character’s grandparents sitting on the porch “transmitting” powerfully “all the way from the mountains.” And what do they transmit? That “this place belongs to us...and we belong to it.” So, here is the ambiguous moment. Do they mean the family belongs to the mountains, are they sending his a ticket home? Are they saying he too can “talk, as naturally as tree frogs”? I doubt it. Given Miller’s parallel focus on immigration and “book learning” I think those grandparents are making a pretty clear distinction between their own porch-rocking wisdom (“When it’s time, we come out on this porch and take our ease”) and the clock-time city life which has claimed the speaker.

This poem, which lays out the Brier’s dilemma, also illustrates Miller tendency to explanation. One of poetry’s pleasures is filling in the blanks and making the leaps, the connections which are implied but not called out. Here, when Miller first tells us he sees his grandparents “Sitting in split-bottom chairs” and then goes on to say “Weathered and homemade like the chairs they sat in” we feel unfairly deprived of a chance to enter into the poem fully. Old mountain people sitting in split-bottom chairs are bound to look weathered to some extent and we had already seen them that way. When he goes on to say “like the house and barn” they are “so comfortably in place” that “they looked like one another.” we are suspicious of the rustic perfection of the portrait. The danger is that if we begin to doubt this physical description we are less likely to believe in the power of the mountain-mind which Miller wants us to take seriously. These are characters who know when the time is right and who can talk naturally. To over-describe them in cliché terms is to undercut whatever else the reader may make of them.

But this poem does illustrate graphically Miller’s profound interest in life’s evolution, in the necessity for growth even when there is a price to be paid. Are the grandparents on that porch, though “comfortably in place”, an ending the Brier should aspire to? Miller doesn’t think so. The Brier may not be at home in the city but he is not going to return to the garden by heading back to the mountains. Life, Miller keeps telling us, is too full of motion, of change. In “Getting Together” Miller describes a reunion with old friends in which he is reflected not as he is, or even as who he was, but rather as a “figure in a fun house mirror.” (pg 7)

Moving through the crowds, I realize
I’ve gradually got used to walking around
in my life a huge elongated trunk and rippled face,
a bulging wrap-around brow, moving on stumpy legs,
my belt just above my shoe tops, my chin
riding level with my fly.

Here Miller worries about again about unhappy endings, claiming we are all “familiar strangers” courting alienation as “we hold back all but the little horrors.” And again, in “I Share’ Miller notes that “Faces under platform lights bear/the tint of the undertaker’s art” and “After a wedding I am apt to step out of the church and head for the gravesite.” And although we humans share experience Miller underlines what he feels is an unavoidable distance that in the end wins out. In “Skydivers” he thinks of us “seated in out separate days” and later “When we are quiet in our separate rooms at night.” He closes this poems with “The Earth grows under us and begins to be patches of ground the size of our shadows.”

However, there is also much appreciation in these poems for life’s richness and its strange offerings. Miller usually gets at these moments by hitting on an image that goes well beyond evocation. For example: “Certain Dreams” (pg 10)

I’m talking about certain dreams that make you wonder,
how did they get there? For coming on them as if
whistling and fumbling with my keys, briefcase in hand,
I’d opened the door into the solid rump of a horse
quartered in my fourth-floor office, and startled,
the horse turned in that small place, hooves clopping,
then stood reading titles on a bookshelf.

Here the poem’s image is as startling as a real horse rump would be behind your office door. By the time Miller gets to “stood reading titles” we feel we may have come upon a humorous self-portrait of a country-born intellect at work.

What Miller and his editor, Greene, have given us in this volume is a rich presentation of an important American experience. Here we have almost a diarist’s recording of the experience of crossing from the place and the culture of one’s birth, with its strong hold on the heart, to a probably inevitable adult life lived in a larger and for the poet more stimulating world of literature. Miller has managed to embrace the latter without abandoning his heart’s home. He considers himself an ambassador from Brier country and reports to us on the place he represents. He does not mean to glorify it, nor does he condemn it. He tell us: 

		Now coal camps where ten thousand lived before
		sink in on themselves like cabins in coves,
		and like old fields, give up to the woods.
		A concrete sidewalk running beside a creek
		pitches, breaks; weeds grow out of the cracks.
		Smaller walks that turned off and rose,
		twelve steps up to a miner’s house, rise now
		to woods. Squirrels chatter and the creek runs. 

		Cut up and bleeding, the land lies breathing hard
		in places torn and gouged beyond all healing,
		in others beautiful and blessed forever.

						(“The Brier’s Pictorial History
						   of the Mountains” pg. 125)
« Back to Excerpts