Honoring E. Ethelbert Miller - poet, editor, teacher, activist

In light of recent events at Howard University, we share this commentary on E. Ethelbert Miller’s outstanding contribution as a poet, editor, teacher, literary activist, and community servant. Myra Sklarew, distinguished poet and member of the Furious Flower Poetry Center Advisory Board, wrote it in tribute. (Miller is pictured below reading at the 2004 Furious Flower Poetry Conference; photo by C. B. Claiborne.)

There comes a time in a life when a person sees his mission as a universal one, where he becomes a citizen of the larger world. Not all of us ever arrive at that place. And it is not garnered by age. For E. Ethelbert Miller it began early.

Before his 24th year, he had gone to Tanzania to attend the Sixth Pan-African Congress where he interviewed Dennis Brutus, who was then part of the African National Congress and had served time, next to Nelson Mandela, in prison on Robben Island. Brutus, activist, journalist, poet, ranges over a broad array of subjects, from political to literary. What is stunning is Miller’s grasp of the political situation of a very complex time and place. When he asks Brutus about the development of drama in Africa, Brutus refers to the “reincorporation of elements from African traditional  drama and ritual … It was religious, didactic, and carried the moral values of the society. It functioned as a part of an initiation ritual. It established community with the dead and the unborn: the African sense of the community of all spirits.”

In a sense, what Miller does both in his life and in his poetry is exactly this: he restores a sense of cultural and ritual wholeness to all that he embraces. When he fosters the work of public libraries, he doesn’t stop at one but sets up a project that embraces libraries all over this country: “the custodians of memory,” he calls them, and he emphasizes the importance of the lifesaving effect of prison libraries.

If it’s the world, it is Iraq, England, Russia, Cuba, Tanzania, Nicaragua, Yemen, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Italy, Norway. If it’s language, his poetry has found its way into Spanish, Portuguese, German, Hungarian, Chinese, Farsi, Norwegian, Tamil, and Arabic.

Yet when he is asked by individuals for help, he is never too busy to be of help. He reminds me of one of our U.S. Poets Laureate, William Stafford, who, when asked for a recommendation six months hence, would answer, “How about tomorrow?!”

The scope of Miller’s poetry is wide. See here in “The Widow of Baghdad”:

After another funeral
the widow removes her black dress
and turns it over to darkness
where
it hangs itself in the corner of the room.

Turning to look into her mirror
she discovers a lump in her breast—
a bomb resting in her hands.

In Baghdad even soft things explode.
A husband’s smile sleeps on a sidewalk
glass glittering instead of teeth.

(From On Saturdays, I Santana With You, Spring 2009)

How the poet brings us the tragedy of Baghdad, of Iraq, of our ancient world in the most human of terms. How he brings it home to us, making it impossible to turn our faces from it.

Gloria Hull has written about his poetry: “These poems transport us across boundaries of place and politics, of race, of gender, and other war-torn barriers of the heart.”

Like these poems, we are reminded that our nation is built upon the legs and arms, the languages and sensibilities of our African ancestors, the variabilities, the diversities, the wonder of our composite make-up. Though we make claims about more recent origins, our true birthplace, all of ours, is in that place.

And the poetry of E. Ethelbert Miller is never didactic, but human, loving, complex, present in the moment, in the lives of men and women. It’s got angels and supermarkets, barefoot buried sons, joggers and missionaries, soldiers legless, God the photographer.

It’s got everything!

Myra Sklarew
May 13, 2015