…
After reading Beautiful Snacks, I have to hold myself back because I don’t want to seem hyperbolic when I say that I really like this book whose first poem is about a father and son called “Love Poem” that is touching, funny and sets the mood.
Love Poem
When Noah was six
he named his thin
pet betta fish
Potato Chip.
When Potato Chip died
I consoled him.
“Potato Chip lived a long life,
Remember the good parts.”
“There were no good parts,”
he cried.
“Potato Chip was boring
but I loved him.”
There are certain poets when I read them, it’s like they’re in the room. They see me and I see them and I believe them too. We’re having a conversation. It’s a kind of metamorphosis, the enjoyer and the joy. Stephen Paul Miller puts me in the present, his present, and I get to share it with him.
In one poem called “I’M INDIE POET” he writes:
I don’t do any one thing.
Indie Poetry hangs in the strike zone for everyone to hit.
I’ve talked with Stephen Paul Miller so I know that his poems sound like he talks, but out of this common speech, this common ground where every reader can come and hit a home run, out of himself he writes his poems.
And like the poem says, he doesn’t do any one thing. Like another New Yorker we know, Stephen contains multitudes. He’s a standup comic throwing zinger one liners at us, a college professor at CUNY too lecturing about history and politics, which he has studied in depth, and knows to be true, and he’s not afraid to walk up to Fame and start a conversation any old place whether it be in a restaurant, during a theater intermission, or on the street. Jean Luc Godard, Bill Clinton, John Ashbery, and John Cage, among others, are for real gossip in these pages that is never apocryphal but always doubtlessly deliciously true.
IT ONLY NOW OCCURS TO ME HOW MUCH
JOHN CAGE INSPIRED BURT BACHARACH
This John Cage-Burt Bacharach story is true.
There’s a wonderful French
horn nearby
and the poetry attached to it
is intense
and sweats like crazy
in a space-time
where A.R. Ammons
and Mark Rothko
die on February 25th
and George Harrison,
Zeppo Marx, and
Meher Baba are born nearby on Feb. 25th—
the same surface when
Burt Bacharach
and John Cage are
early ’50s
New York
friends (true story)
when Burt writes a
piece for oboe &
2 other instruments
and thinking of Cage
feels it too
melodious,
and his great French composition
teacher says, Burt
never
fear being
too melodious—
and it changes his life
and we too should throw
out Burt’s beautiful net
and not fear making
too much sense
Does no dog lick the wind? —
Hillel tells you
“Where there is no
Man
Be One”
and
“The truth is what helps people,
The truth is what makes people
Big,”
says Meher Baba.
We’re all like Burt Bacharach
imperceptibly pushed by John Cage
in odd and surprising ways
striking one intricate and sublime
simplicity after another.
With Beautiful Snacks I get the dish and learn something new because these poems want to nurture and look out for me like a teacher or a father would, or an affectionate son, and most of all I have to say that reading Beautiful Snacks was a lot of fun. Fun is Love. Love is Fun.
At KGB on May 11, Stephen Paul Miller read poems from Beautiful Snacks in the Vimeo that follows. Enjoy.
Stephen Paul Miller reads from Beautiful Snacks
No Description
I’m Flying
next to my mother in her window seat,
and with still fluffy clouds suspended on the wing,
she says,
“Steve, I think we stopped!”
My mother doesn’t know mythology but lives it.
She’s a great and biblical presence.
That’s why she’s so annoying.
Once I told her my dissertation was being published.
“But then,” she says, “people will be able to steal it. . . .
Steve, you’re not a baby anymore. When will you stop
doing baby things like writing books?”
Born to observant Russian Jews in East Harlem,
second youngest of nine,
marrying my father at 25,
working all day in their drug store, widowed at 70,
she never gave up on anyone.
I thought all drug stores meant
medicine for everybody, no questions asked
except about your kids.
My mother was a good person.
“Kaddish” is Aramaic for “holy,” and
what could be more holy than a good person?
A good person, says the Kaddish, makes God bigger,
My mother put a magnifying glass up to God,
setting apart what is holy by making others big,
having the extraordinary power
to delight in every detail about
you and your family.
When she tells my son
he’s baked in her heart
it makes him think,
making him bigger and more insightful.
She only regrets
not living longer,
she says, because
she won’t know
what kind of
big man he’ll be.
At 95 she’s babysitting.
I come home to find her with
my copy of Ginsberg’s “Kaddish.”
Reading it for the first time, she’s crying.
“Your mother was still charming at 103
when I sent her a bouquet,” says my friend Cliff Fyman.
A social worker on the Staten Island Ferry tells me,
“Everyone in Stapleton applying for benefits
uses your mother’s name for their first reference.”
When she’s little,
her big sisters change
her name
from Rachel—
it only now occurs to me they said Ruchel—
to Rita
to make it feel more
American.
Ma’s name at birth is Ruchel Melnikoff.
Yisgadal v’yiskadash shmay raba —
“Magnified and sanctified be the great name,”
says the Aramaic of the Hebrew Kaddish.
But how can anyone make God bigger?
My mother made everyone bigger
and mostly me.
,,,
This Is a Poem for David Shapiro, a Great Poet
Who Played a Violin and Recently Died
I can already see the wall
around paradise lifting
Ecstatic,
I know no difference
between heaven
and this moment,
your garden
and a bell,
a violin and going crazy.
The fiddle sways and
its profile shows
each note to be a detail
of its soft and
infinite garden.
…
CAKE, BOOK, AND CANDLE
“Where did the baby go?”
two-year-old Noah asks
as he flips through the Moses
kids’ book our friendly
born-again doorman gave him.
“Moses grew up,” I tell him.
But he keeps turning,
finds the Burning Bush,
yells “HOT!” and blows it out.
Then, coming to Moses’s tablets,
he finally gets the connection.
Pointing to the tablets,
he says, “Cake! Cake!”
The next day I go inside
a real-life ginger “cake” house
in a Chelsea art gallery
and think of Moses and Noah.
JOE BRAINARD
Fish
On music paper
Brings me joy.
Beautiful Snacks is published by March Hawk Press. You can check it out here:
Beautiful Snacks | Marsh Hawk Press
Beautiful Snacks by Stephen Paul Miller is a fearless, genre-bending feast for adventurous poets and readers mixing satire, spirituality, theater, and more.
Stephen Paul Miller reads his translation of Agnieszka Ginko’s poem Pierścionki: “Rings”
In Stephen Paul Miller’s new book of poems, Beautiful Snacks, he translates a poem from the Polish by Agnieszka Ginko, a poem called Pierścionki or in Stephen’s words, “Rings.” And here it is for you.
Stephen Paul Miller reads three inaugural poems
THE OPPOSITE OF CAPITOL VIOLENCE At the ’63 march on Washington A. Philip Randolph says “racists seek to strangle Congress.” I find myself so between. On January 5, 2021, We march to the sea in a good way, Taking Georgia to roll back the 2006 voting rights rollback Getting back to Reconstruction before we gave up on The non-violence at the electoral heart: What investigation needs to be taken?