Miller Light

Shedding light on Joaquin Miller / letting Miller's light shine / making light of an old poet's woes.

My talk this week about Joaquin Miller went well, but was far more difficult to pull together than I thought it would be. The more I learned, the more inspired I became, and the harder it became to fit his wide and deep story into an hour-long talk. I also think I may have cracked the mystery of why people in Oakland seem to hate him so much.

Gertrude Farquharson Boyle Kanno modeling Miller’s bust.

Truly I was grateful to have a mountain of information to sink my hands into, to wrap my head around, to anchor my spirit during election week, a deep historical dive that reminded me this country, this world, has survived harder times. What I couldn’t put into the talk I put into a wiki. I barely looked up from my laptop for a week. It was better than processing what was going on in the world and our crazy town. (So weird… feels like we’ve been here already…)

I sought out the elfish author Alan Rosenus, who discovered and published Miller’s manuscript for Life Among the Modocs, and he led me right to Boyle’s statue at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, California.

But here’s what it feels like with Miller. He’s a gold mine. If you’ve never heard of him, was a late 19th century writer and poet who left this beautiful park in my neighborhood. Here in Oakland we see him as “a hack, a clown, a wannabe, a failed poet, and the guy who planted all the Eucalyptus trees.” But in his time he was a force of friendship, a volcano of poetry, a theatrical superstar who made it into the spotlight and shone his own light on everyone around him. He admired, loved, and supported those in New York like Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde (who were also heavily criticized as their voices and essences emerged); was admired and supported by Dante Rossetti and Lord Alfred Tennyson in England, Ina Coolbrith and Charles Warren Stoddard in California, and many, many, many more. (And he slept under a bearskin and had some incredible women as his muses.)

Once, he was introduced as the greatest poet in California. “That title belongs to Bret Harte,” he said with grave humility, then added, with great humor, “I do not represent California, but a little hill called The Earth.”

My lecture was full of lumps and bumps and I sometimes found it hard to say what was actually true about the guy, he shimmers so (and so does my mind), and I am sure in my stress I got some facts and phrases wrong. I’ll give it a polish and edit it together with the slides for the Oakland Library site, but if you missed my talk and hoped for a recording and don’t mind some ums and ahs and the hum of a projector, here’s the raw sound file for now. It’s got some lovely poems in it, too.

The more I learn about Joaquin Miller, the more interesting and relatable he becomes. I find his flaws humanizing and his message uplifting. He may have some real gifts for our generation if he’s given a chance. There’s a little Joaquin Miller in all of us.

My Traveling. Bookstore & my growing collection of Miller and Miller-adjacent books aka my California Writers Library. Photo by Jasper Ezekiel.

Check out the new wiki for Miller Nerds at www.MillerLight.org.

I even made t-shirts!

.