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| Kei Miller: ‘My productivity is linked to what could be called a disability’ | Kei Miller: ‘My productivity is linked to what could be called a disability’ |
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| In the summer, Jeremy Paxman outraged the poetry world by using his chairmanship of one of its premier prizes as a pulpit for denouncing an art form that, he said, had “connived at its own irrelevance”. Announcing the shortlists for this year’s Forward Prizes, he called for an inquisition into the purpose of poetry, saying poets should talk more to ordinary people. The cluster of events around National Poetry Day this week will certainly strain his thesis, from a national slam final at the Royal Albert Hall to the Forward prizes themselves, at the Southbank Centre in London. | In the summer, Jeremy Paxman outraged the poetry world by using his chairmanship of one of its premier prizes as a pulpit for denouncing an art form that, he said, had “connived at its own irrelevance”. Announcing the shortlists for this year’s Forward Prizes, he called for an inquisition into the purpose of poetry, saying poets should talk more to ordinary people. The cluster of events around National Poetry Day this week will certainly strain his thesis, from a national slam final at the Royal Albert Hall to the Forward prizes themselves, at the Southbank Centre in London. |
| One poet who will be hoping that Paxman stands by his views is a 35-year-old Jamaican whose work would appear to do what the broadcaster demands. Kei Miller is among five poets in contention for the 2014 Forward prize for best collection, which will be awarded on Tuesday. This month, he was named as one of 20 Next Generation poets, a zeitgeist-defining list produced every 10 years by the Poetry Book Society. He is also shortlisted, along with Man Booker laureate Eleanor Catton and Baileys winning novelist Eimear McBride, for the multi-disciplinary Dylan Thomas prize for writers below the age of 40. | |
| In the eight years since his first collection was published Miller has produced two novels, a short story collection, three more poetry collections and a book of “essays and prophecies”. He is also a prolific blogger and tweeter – testament to a fidgetiness that was recently diagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “Part of my productivity is linked to what could be called a disability,” he says. “It’s easy for me to start writing a poetry collection and get bored after two lines, then to start a short essay and get bored after two sentences and then switch to a short story and get bored after two pages.” | In the eight years since his first collection was published Miller has produced two novels, a short story collection, three more poetry collections and a book of “essays and prophecies”. He is also a prolific blogger and tweeter – testament to a fidgetiness that was recently diagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “Part of my productivity is linked to what could be called a disability,” he says. “It’s easy for me to start writing a poetry collection and get bored after two lines, then to start a short essay and get bored after two sentences and then switch to a short story and get bored after two pages.” |
| Miller was born into Kingston’s literary elite (his grandfather was a journalist and novelist manqué), but he dropped out of an English degree at the University of the West Indies despite being singled out by his professor, who encouraged him to carry on writing. At 25, he moved to Britain to do an MA in creative writing in Manchester, where he caught the eye of another academic, Michael Schmidt, who was to become his publisher. “He was from the outset a remarkable student, already alert and well formed, and always at a slight angle to the groups he was in,” recalls Schmidt. “He was penniless and used secretly to go out and win slams [competitive poetry readings] in order to feed himself, fearing that if I heard he was a slam poet I would disapprove.” | |
| At a poetry seminar in the US three years later, Miller spoke of his embarrassment at becoming 2004 Manchester slam poetry champion. “I am ashamed to have won that prize, and truth be told, I am also ashamed that I am ashamed.” His ambivalence cut to the heart of the poetry world’s own resistance to performance poetry, which Miller described as “a fight between the poet who does his best work standing up, who finds his greatest eloquence on stage, and the poet who does his best work sitting down, who finds his greatest eloquence on the page”. | At a poetry seminar in the US three years later, Miller spoke of his embarrassment at becoming 2004 Manchester slam poetry champion. “I am ashamed to have won that prize, and truth be told, I am also ashamed that I am ashamed.” His ambivalence cut to the heart of the poetry world’s own resistance to performance poetry, which Miller described as “a fight between the poet who does his best work standing up, who finds his greatest eloquence on stage, and the poet who does his best work sitting down, who finds his greatest eloquence on the page”. |
| In this, as in many areas, Miller is conscious of being a child of two worlds. The “sit-down poet” who slams is also an academic who blogs. He is a deeply political writer, alert to the nuances of culture and unafraid to confront them. He is, for instance, an outspoken critic of Jamaican homophobia, deploying his whole battery of literary forms to push his views. But, he says, “my politics shift dramatically: when I’m in Jamaica I’m very much on the side of combating homophobia but when in the UK I’m aware that it’s often an excuse for a kind of racism – those savages who need to be rescued”. | In this, as in many areas, Miller is conscious of being a child of two worlds. The “sit-down poet” who slams is also an academic who blogs. He is a deeply political writer, alert to the nuances of culture and unafraid to confront them. He is, for instance, an outspoken critic of Jamaican homophobia, deploying his whole battery of literary forms to push his views. But, he says, “my politics shift dramatically: when I’m in Jamaica I’m very much on the side of combating homophobia but when in the UK I’m aware that it’s often an excuse for a kind of racism – those savages who need to be rescued”. |
| In Glasgow, where he moved after Manchester to do a PhD and to teach, he found common cause in a language that was in constant negotiation with textbook English. “In Jamaica,” he says, “it is known as the post-Creole continuum spectrum – the slide up and down from dialect, which is a lot like the slide between Scots and English: it can change mid-sentence.” | |
| This slide is enshrined in his latest collection. The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion features a mapmaker who speaks the Queen’s English but sucks his teeth like a Jamaican, and a “rastaman” with a PhD. “My job is to untangle the tangled,” says the cartographer, to which the rastaman responds: “the mapmaker’s work is to make visible / all them things that shoulda never exist in the first place / like the conquest of pirates, like borders, / like the viral spread of governments”. Both dismiss the other, but neither is wrong. | |
| “I wanted to signal that the binaries are not as fixed as we make them,” says Miller. At the heart of his work is a quest for a way of being and seeing that resists the orthodoxies. “Why,” he asks, “is the iambic pentameter seen as more credible than the Rasta nayabinghi [drumming] beat? Both claim to represent a heartbeat rhythm, but they’re drastically different.” While he isn’t himself a Rastafarian, he is sympathetic to many of the views of those who are. “Religion is superstition, and superstition is an authentic way of knowing.” | |
| Between his second collection and his third, his mother died, throwing him into a crisis that was to open up another creative seam. “My mother had died and the recession was in full swing, but I wanted to write poems that were hopeful. How do you sing a song of light in a dark time without ever undercutting it with irony, which is how British poetry signals itself as intelligent? I come from a country that is not very ironic, and I just think that it’s not the only way to be clever in the world.” | Between his second collection and his third, his mother died, throwing him into a crisis that was to open up another creative seam. “My mother had died and the recession was in full swing, but I wanted to write poems that were hopeful. How do you sing a song of light in a dark time without ever undercutting it with irony, which is how British poetry signals itself as intelligent? I come from a country that is not very ironic, and I just think that it’s not the only way to be clever in the world.” |
| One critic wrote of the resulting collection, A Light Song of Light, that “it is poetry as song, poetry as aural experience, poetry that wears its heart on its sleeve and asks the same from the reader”. It is this hard-won and joyful leap into hope that has earned him his place as one of poetry’s Next Generation, whether or not he wins Paxman’s vote. | One critic wrote of the resulting collection, A Light Song of Light, that “it is poetry as song, poetry as aural experience, poetry that wears its heart on its sleeve and asks the same from the reader”. It is this hard-won and joyful leap into hope that has earned him his place as one of poetry’s Next Generation, whether or not he wins Paxman’s vote. |