Miller Oberman
- Program Director, First Year Writing, The New School
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Articles by Miller Oberman
Miller Oberman’s playlist for his poetry collection “Impossible Things”
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others. Miller Oberman’s poetry collectionImpossible Things is a mesmerizing elegy for a young child and thoughtful examination of the author’s own childhood.
“On Similes,” a Poem by Miller Oberman
“On Similes” Article continues after advertisement I have read my father’s book and, as I suspected, much of it is bad. Especially the attempts to teach mindfulness, which, given that once at a bakery he listened at length to a woman from a mindfulness class he taught gush about its effectiveness all the while standing on my mother’s foot, is no surprise to me. Especially bad are the similes. “Grief is like an unkempt beggar” (242). “…sniff these last days of summer like a fine wine” (242).
Two Shabbats with Paul Celan
arrowy one, when you whir toward me, I know from where, I forget from where. —Paul Celan, “A Ring, for Bowdrawing,” tr. by Pierre Joris One Friday it sunned all over the catmint and coneflowers, then I read Celan and grew concerned. “The stone behind the eye,” he wrote, “it recognizes you,” “on a Sabbath.” At first I thought you was him but what if you was me? This is from “Vinegrowers,” his last poem, worked April 1–13, 1970, in Paris.
Theory by Miller Oberman
Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions—and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them.
All These Beloved Books
“When you go crazy, you don’t have the slightest inclination to read anything Foucault ever wrote about culture and madness,” the poet Mary Ruefle said. When I read Miller Oberman’s poem “All These Beloved Books,” that is what came back to me. The speaker is surrounded by texts about death, but what they want is to reach their father, who is dead.
Read By: Miller Wolf Oberman
I will not try to introduce Anne Carson here. If you are one of the several people who do not know the work of this poet, essayist, and classicist, I will just say I envy you your impending discovery. One of the great joys, for me, of her work is that I am never certain what I’ll find. A scholarly translation of an ancient Greek play? A collaborative reinvention of an ancient text into a graphic novel? A poetry collection?
Commas by Miller Oberman - Poems
Difficult once I've said things to know them this morning the lights above the tollway all off at exactly 7:36 all "we took our yellow from the pewter sky." But we have so many things! Stories about our diction, the leather couch some trees and our ages. What about all the rooms the sky makes— she tried several spaces today, under a desk, a nook bent to her. I thought of picking a fight with dead Bachelard.
“The Wind Is Loud”
Audio: Read by the author.
Esmeralda Santiago with Priscilla López and Antonia Cereijido
Dec 17, 2018 A celebration of the 25th anniversary of the publication of When I Was Puerto Rican, featuring a reading of the memoir by acclaimed actor Priscilla López and an interview of Esmeralda Santiago by award-winning Latino USA producer, Antonia Cereijido. Presented in collaboration with Latino USA, the Peabody Award-winning public radio program and podcast. 92Y needs your help Many of you have asked how you can help 92Y as we face tremendous financial losses due to Covid-19.
This and That at the Frick
I bring my students to the Frick to see Frank O’Hara’s beloved Polish Rider, and after giggling at the work Bronzino did on the silver painted crotch of Lodovico Capponi, whose silk sprouts like a big snail or scrolled bedpost between his legs, we walk to the West Gallery and all agree Rembrandt did a grand job. The young man is handsome, his horse handsomer, especially its head. The rider looks like he could dismount, meet O’Hara and Ashbery at the San Remo or Cedar for drinks. I get it.
On Trans by Miller Oberman
The process of through is ongoing. The earth doesn’t seem to move, but sometimes we fall down against it and seem to briefly alight on its turning. We were just going. I was just leaving, which is to say, coming elsewhere. Transient. I was going as I came, the words move through my limbs, lungs, mouth, as I appear to sit peacefully at your hearth transubstantiating some wine.
Joy by Miller Oberman
Like the time I dreamt about a loon family, just some common loons—not metaphors in any way, just real loons in a lake swimming near each other so it was clear they were a set, preferring each other’s company in the cold still lake with its depth of reflected pines. The curve of their black heads and sleek necks, black and white stripes then checks on their folded wings, floating so low atop their reflections they almost seem inside them.
Lies After the War
We went to Bull Run, or was it Manassas, one of those, past Battlefield Ford, past Glory Days bar in the strip mall, or was it before the mall was built, or was it after the mall was abandoned. I was grizzled with age, I was twenty one, at the small beige visitor center. I remember it without sound. They had a machine there that sucked up sound. It was mostly made of hollows, blanks, lack, and also plastic.
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At the top of the stairs, spiraled as the core of a nautilus, safe in the iron light cage, I look down the coast my grandfather guarded, winter, 1942, pacing the sand with bayonet, or from the watch tower.
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