I may never have written a sadder poem than “Thief After Dark,” the piece that appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. I am not talking about subject matter – no one dies in this poem, or even gets hurt – but simply about tone and consistency. Scanning over this poem, more than 20 years after I wrote it, I am struck by the sheer number of negative words: “didn’t,” “only,” “no one,” “without,” “never,” “not even,” “nothing.” Then there are the sensory images in between: “thief,” “silent,” “shadows,” “darkest figure,” “alarm,” “back turned,” “steal.” Morning does make an appearance in the poem, but only to emphasize the lines under a despondent woman's eyes.
I'm not sure if I would write a poem like this today. Would, not could. When I wrote "Thief After Dark" (and the 2002 chapbook from FarStarFire Press that bears its name), I was into grand statements as a writer -- not atypical of an undergraduate, I'm sure. I went for operatic touches, heightened emotions, characters who lived to be anxious or fatalistic. In the years since, I've sought a kind of equilibrium, a forum for the kind of emotions that don't easily fit under a label. Looking back at the last few poems that have appeared in Radical Wonder, I'm not sure if any of them can be labeled simply as "happy" or "sad"; they occupy a rubbery space in between. In "Woman Next Door," a comfortable couple watches a heated domestic dispute through window glass; in "Grandfather," an old man who has fled turmoil in Asia coexists in an American home with rambunctious children and their toys. "Ghost Town Pantoum," which portrays a romantic couple roaming through abandoned streets, contains the line "We kiss in the shade of the jail." It took years for me to understand the possibilities of that kiss. In poems like "Thief After Dark," we get only the jail. But then, as the old saying goes, we should be moderate in all things, including moderation. Every poem can't balance the light and the dark; sometimes, we need to lurch into one extreme or the other. When I jotted down "Thief After Dark" as a student at UCI, I must have felt the need for catharsis of some kind. As I have noted before, many of my poems during those years were spontaneous, nocturnal pieces; I would wake in the middle of the night with an idea, scribble it in the notepad by my bed, then flop back on the mattress. "Thief After Dark" came about that way. I don't recall having felt like the narrator in the poem, but perhaps I was imagining the life of an older, richer person (he and his partner must have done well, at least superficially, to live in "a silent house along the coast") whose wealth couldn't shield him from despair. I was a serious writer then, maybe to a fault. Years later, I would watch Ben Trigg and Steve Ramirez hosting Two Idiots Peddling Poetry at the Ugly Mug and recognize the value of lightening up. Before then, I operated under the dubious premise that sober was best. Not long after I wrote "Thief After Dark," I got an invitation to give my first poetry reading at Alta Coffee, a gloriously ramshackle venue tucked on a side street in Newport Beach. The reading series was hosted by Lee Mallory, then Orange County's great poetry impresario; I had made his acquaintance by publishing listings for his shows in the Los Angeles Times and decided to chance the open mic there one night. Once invited back, I rehearsed my reading painstakingly, to the point where my co-feature took me aside a few minutes before showtime, gestured toward the people sitting at the dim, mismatched tables, and dryly intoned, "Michael -- these are your friends." As I recall, "Thief After Dark" was among the poems that I read that night. I probably did a good job of reading it, even if the show as a whole lacked a certain lightness of being. Now, more than 20 years have passed, and that performance that once felt like a herculean trial has receded into memory -- mine, if no one else's. At some point in life, we take inventory of what has survived and what hasn't. Most of what I described above falls into the latter category: FarStarFire Press has gone out of business, Mallory has moved out of California and retired his readings, and the Times no longer runs Orange County poetry listings. What remains is "Thief After Dark," which I like to this day and which, to my knowledge, has never been pirated or plagiarized. I made certain of that; before I gave the reading at Alta, I registered all of the poems in my notebook with the Library of Congress to ensure that no one would steal them. Back then, I understood poetry as a business, even if it only paid in tip jars.
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This is the blog of Michael Miller, a longtime journalist, poet, publisher and teacher. Check here for musings, observations, commentary and assorted bits of gratitude. Archives
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