About the Poems - BM
About the Poems
by Benjamin Miller "The Errand" owes a great deal to an internship at the Poetry Society of America, though the couch was located elsewhere. Thanks to Jesse Ball for the comma in line eight. As ever, Jesse noticed what I meant to write, and was gracious enough to point it out to me. "The Visit" offers as a gift one of my favorite nightmare images, that of the un-locking door. It began as an assignment to myself. For "The Warning" I must thank James Wright, and his poem "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." Needless to say, the warning itself I have not yet heeded. "The Catch" reflects an older conception of how this series of poems would work, namely, that they would each represent one day of a week. (There are, indeed, seven in all, of which the first five appear here. Thanks go to Timothy Donnelly for challenging me to make them a complete loop.) This was my Wednesday, which should help explain where the wolves came from. "The Offing" was particularly satisfying in that it allowed me to use two lines I'd been carrying around in a coat pocket for roughly three years: "intimations of the thaw" and "cuneiform cracks on the bathroom door." The door in question was in Harvard's Kirkland House, where I did not live.