In Retrospect: An Interview with Alice Miller, Author of Here and Thereafter
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Alice Miller, whose collection Nowhere Nearer was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. We sought to hear about core writing practices and fascinations which have shaped Miller’s body of work. In her most recent book, Here & Thereafter, “the sensory richness of Miller’s poetry—her gift for evoking place through texture and season, situation through detail and lacuna—only emphasises her conviction” says Ranjit Hoskote. Here, Miller walks us through her life in poetry thus far, from early poems “entangled in song” to continued obsessions with history, disruption, and ghosts.
Frontier Poetry: What was the first poem, published or unpublished, that you remember writing? What aspect of it do you look back at and appreciate the most?
Alice Miller: With the very first poems I wrote when I was a kid, I remember being entangled in song. The sound of the words led me into the meaning. While they were pretty awful poems, that’s still the aspect I appreciate the most; they were poems that wanted to sing. They wanted to be alive, to twist free of their own confines.
F.P.: If there is a poem you could identify as either the launch point, catalyst, or axle The Limits spins around, which poem would that be? What did the process of writing that poem entail?
A.M.: There are many moments that might serve as axles for the book. The Limits was published 12 years ago and it’s hard for me to remember the process. But there are several moments that shine through as ongoing obsessions for me, and so here are two. One is a couple of lines from the last poem, ‘Orbit’:
Ours is a life worth losing; let’s unlace it
from its post and see what creature it becomes.
And the other is a very short poem that I’d completely forgotten, called ‘The Ache’
When.
You are locked
in the wing
of history
with blood still
stuck in your wrists.
Shake the hell out of them.
In these rooms,
the years
are just one breath.
F.P.: What lesson(s) did writing and publishing your previous works such as Nowhere Nearer and What Fire teach you which you applied to your newest collection?
A.M.: I can see now that in a way, Nowhere Nearer is a kind of exile from the self, a collection that moves through my borrowed city of Vienna with the ghosts of Freud and W.H. Auden. What Fire is in exile from the climate crisis, and much of it takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. My new book, Here & Thereafter shares obsessions with the other books, but it’s very much about the city of Berlin, where I’ve lived for the last eight years. It’s about Germany, which my grandmother fled from as a German Jew in the 1930s, and about bringing up a small child here, during the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
F.P.: In terms of the evolution of your latest collection, Here and Thereafter, could you briefly map out the stages your manuscript went through, from a starting point to the final draft?
A.M.: I began thinking I was writing a collection about architecture, with many architectural poems and a lot about building and collapse. Five years on, the final collection has nothing to do with architecture, and not a single one of those poems made the cut. I never quite know where I’ll end up, but it’s never where I plan to be!
F.P.: What running themes or fascinations do you identify throughout your poetry, from your earliest poems to your most recent ones?
A.M.: Death and the body; the disruption of the earth; a fear of being too comfortable. An obsession with history and the desperation for—and failure of—repair. Playfulness, breakages, and ghosts, ghosts, ghosts.
F.P.: Finally, as you are writing currently (or simply thinking, which is where writing starts), what is something—an idea, social issue, piece of art, song, etc.—that you are obsessed with?
A.M.:Yesterday I came back from a literary festival in Norway called Møllebyen, and I’m neck-deep in poems by the other participants: Bhanu Kapil, Ghayath Almadhoun, and Ariana Reines. Such a beautiful festival.
