A genius obscured

Sojourners, May/Jun 2000 by Griffin, Shaun

Vassar Miller is the Emily Dickinson of the 20th century. Who knew?

Pity is a distraction, I'm too mean to die.

-Vassar Miller

Late at night, I was nearly asleep on the couch; the phone rang. Jay Leach, the Baptist miniser from Houston. Did I remember him? In my grogginess, there was no mistaking his tone: At 74, Vassar Miller's seemingly endless life had been eclipsed by a final silence.

Poet, self-taught theologian, disability advocate, and feisty womanVassar Miller's life was a confluence of desire, hope, and dire suffering. Few writers have been so unfailingly honest and determined to chink from the bounds of American letters a place for themselves. Paradoxically, save the admiration of a dozen of our most respected poets, she went to her grave in virtual anonymity.

A poet who wrote predominantly in traditional forms, she was among a handful of post-war formalists who wrote on religious themes. When you consider this was during the height of the Beats and the Confessional poets, choosing to write in form was not an idle undertaking. To paraphrase poet and critic Hayden Carruth, to write a poem is an act of love; ergo, Miller wrote the poems that had to be written. Those who cherish finely crafted poetry about spiritual issues, the struggle to fmd one's self amidst a mostly godless world, read Vassar Miller. Not just for her countenance, but for her unflinching attempts to name the experience of an invisible woman, as in "Meditation after an Interview":

I speak myself, and my name

is only smoke

and less than smoke.

Unlike most of her peers, she was twice damned: for writing in form about such "outdated" subjects as Christ dying, and for having cerebral palsy since birth. But out of that contemporary isolation came her strength: She could not aspire to any artificial liking. Her words were the harbinger of religious feeling not imagined in American poetry since the death of T.S. Eliot.

WHEN I VISITED Vassar at Stoneybrook Health Care Center in Houston, most people did not know who she was. She was a woman, like any other, whose flesh was giving out. I asked what she needed. Books, of course, was her immediate answer. Then I read poems to her. She was transfixed, so focused on her craft that nothing could penetrate that concentration. Even in the throes of the nursing home, her mind was more lucid than many in their cars speeding the street outside.

Miller has had her champions: Donald Hall, who early on helped her publish Wage War on Silence; the late Denise Levertov, a poet not unfamiliar with political and religious isolation; Miller Williams, who read at President Clinton's second inauguration; Maxine Cassin, publisher of the New Orleans Poetry Journal Press; and perhaps most notably Larry McMurtry. In an otherwise damning essay on Texas writers, he singled out Vassar Miller as the lone poet who would leave a half-dozen poems for posterity. There are many others who know and regard Miller's work with the highest admiration, but the brooding silence remains.

Perhaps this is because at some intrinsic level her poems both comfort and deeply disturb. They are a bulwark of faith against unremitting doubt and perturbation. That which can never be fully said in a poem was her subject: an undying love of God and the hollow, often failed, experience of self. Just as haunting, they bore no lasting reconciliation for her, save the symbolic renewal of the Eucharist to which she returned again and again, as in these stanzas from the poem "My Bones Being Wiser:"

I do not have the good fortune of looking ahead 50 years, but if the past is any example (Melville, Dickinson), Miller's poetry, much like her life, will come to be viewed as witness to living in a time that could not know her. She balanced the ineffable with such strength, such immutable force, that I can only believe readers will return to the vast emotional landscape she has left if for no other reason than to learn how to live when one comes to silence "Without Ceremony":

BEYOND HER DOGS and her friends, few things made Vassar Miller happier than Sundays. She cherished the morning rituals and repetition of the Episcopal Church. In many ways it gave her structure, not unlike that of her formal poems in the "Christ-haunted landscape of the South," to quote Flannery O'Connor. In the afternoons, the liberal Baptist congregation freed her from tradition. She wrote poems and a sermon that were not altogether welcomed by the Baptists, but she could rebel, be the skeptic, and sleep with two faiths twined at her core. Conflicted to the end by the unanswered question of her worth in this worldwhether flesh or spirit, she held Sundays like bread to her lips.

On religious themes Miller could parry and spar with anyone in the room. At home, the answers so readily delivered in public were slow in coming. Before her caretakers sold her house on Vassar Street (named after her mother, Vassar Morrison), she wrestled with the contradictions of flesh and stone. Her appetite for living was tamed only by the persistent drum of disability. What she wanted more than anything was love. What she found were scraps and pieces of lives and a religious community that would not forsake her: St. Stephen's Episcopal Church and Covenant Baptist Church.