The City, Our City: Poems

By Wayne Miller

“[A] wide-ranging, fascinating series of poems that [has] the city as character at its center, the city as a collective soul, the city as idea.” —Sycamore Review

A William Carlos Williams Award Finalist

A Kansas City Star Top Book of the Year

A Library Journal Top Winter Poetry Pick

A series of semi-mythologized, symbolic narratives interspersed with dramatic monologues, the poems collected in The City, Our City showcase the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on “the City.” It is an unnamed, crowded place where the human questions and observations found in almost any city—past, present, and future—ring out with urgency. These poems—in turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyful—give hum to our modern experience, to those caught up in the City’s immensity, and announce the arrival of a major new contemporary poet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781571318305

Wayne Miller

Wayne Miller is the author of Post-, winner of the Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award; The City, Our City, shortlisted for the Rilke Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award; The Book of Props, named a best poetry book of the year by Coldfront Magazine and the Kansas City Star; and Only the Senses Sleep, winner of the William Rockhill Nelson Award. He has received the George Bogin Memorial Award, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, the Lyric Poetry Award, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize, and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. He is cotranslator of two books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo—most recently Zodiac, which was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation—and coeditor of three books: Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master, and New European Poets. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, and serves as editor/managing editor of Copper Nickel.

Book preview

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Table of Contents

ALSO BY WAYNE MILLER

Title Page

Dedication

Praise

A PRAYER (O CITY—)

I

DEAR AUDEN,

THE FEAST

II

FLOODING THE VALLEY

STREET FIGHT

A HISTORY OF ART

III

A HISTORY OF WAR

IDENTIFYING THE BODY

IV

I’VE HEARD THAT OUTSIDE THE CITY

THE DEATH OF THE FRONTIER

WINTER PASTORAL

V

THE ASSASSINATION LECTURE

THE BEAUTIFUL CITY (IN 32 STROKES)

IN THE MUSEUM: A PASTORAL

VI

AMERICAN AUBADE

AMERICAN NOCTURNE

VII

THE DEAD MOOR SPEAKS

SILENCE IN THE CITY

VIII

POEM SLIPPED BETWEEN TWO LINES BY VALLEJO

NOTHING IN THE LETTERS: AN ELEGY

REPORT FROM THE DYING DISTRICT

IX

THOSE BOYS

THE WALL

A TREATISE ON POWER (IN 32 STROKES)

X

IN THE BARRACKS: A FOUND POEM

BOMBING THE CITY

XI

[THE CHILD’S CRY IS A LIGHT THAT COMES ON IN THE HOUSE]

AFTER THE FEVER: A PASTORAL

XII

THE RESCUE

ARCHEOLOGY

XIII

CPR

OUR LAST VISIT

XIV

NOTES/SOURCES

Acknowledgments

MORE POETRY FROM MILKWEED EDITIONS

Copyright Page

ALSO BY WAYNE MILLER

POETRY COLLECTIONS

ἀ e Book of Props

Only the Senses Sleep

CHAPBOOKS

O City

What Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse)

TRANSLATIONS

I Don’t Believe in Ghosts, by Moikom Zeqo

EDITED BOOKS

Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Works of a 20th Century Master

(with Takako Lento)

New European Poets (with Kevin Prufer)

This book is for my parents, who first took me to the City and for Harper Elyse, who will inherit it

. . . they pushed on, raised the flag of the Word Upon lawless spots denied or forgotten By the fear or the pride of the Glittering City . . .

—W. H. AUDEN

the city that wakes every hundred years and looks at itself in the mirror of a word and doesn’t recognize itself and goes back to sleep . . .

—OCTAVIO PAZ

Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard.

—ITALO CALVINO

A PRAYER (O CITY—)

O arrow landed deep in Harold’s eye—

O voice

pressing upward against the sky—

O light and steam.

(When the western windows

of the City go pink, the rooms behind them

lock shut with clouds.)

O clouds—

(Slipping down in the morning

to part around the skyrises, to marble

the rooftop shanties and gardens,

the hammocks and clotheslines.)

And graying water tanks—

(Our water lifted

into the clouds—and me, drawing it

down into my cup, my breath

pressed to the shimmering surface.)

O City—

(That breathes itself

into the glass—that pulls me to the window

I press my gaze through,

I press my face to—)

O City—

(And the makers,

who drew the City through the membranes

of paper and canvas,

giving the city to the City—)

O City—

(And our tables and demitasses,

woofers and fire escapes,

kisses in doorways, weapons

and sculptures, concerts

and fistfights, sex toys and votives,

engines and metaphors—.)

City of Joists—

(The City