Impossible Things: A Poet's Journey Through Loss and Translation with Miller Wolf Oberman

What happens when grief becomes inheritance? When poet Miller Oberman became a father himself, he suddenly understood something that had shaped his entire life: he had been parented by someone traumatized by the loss of a child. This revelation sparked an extraordinary poetic journey, driving him toward his father's unfinished memoir about the drowning death of his two-year-old son Joshua in 1972.

"Impossible Things," Oberman's second collection, emerges from this intersection of personal and inherited trauma. Through his meticulous craft, Oberman transforms fragments of his father's prose into erasure poems, creating a dialogue between father and son that transcends death. The collection explores how tragedy ripples through generations, manifesting in unexpected ways—like the single small shoe belonging to Joshua that his father kept among his own shoes, a haunting presence throughout Oberman's childhood.

Formal constraints become crucial tools for approaching unbearable subjects. Oberman employs "the beautiful outlaw," a form that systematically omits letters, making it impossible to directly name what's being described. This technique brilliantly mirrors the experience of absence itself, forcing creative circumlocution that often leads to more profound expressions than straightforward language could achieve. As Oberman notes, "I go to therapy to write poems, not the other way around"—a reminder that while poetry may heal, its purpose extends beyond therapeutic release.

Readers familiar with loss will find recognition in these pages, while those intimidated by poetry will discover accessible entry points through the collection's clear narrative framework. Oberman's mission echoes his father's original intention in writing his memoir: to tell others experiencing profound grief that they are not alone. Through exquisite craft and unflinching honesty, "Impossible Things" accomplishes something remarkable—it makes the unspeakable not only speakable but beautiful.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 1:36 Welcome to Miller Oberman
• 15:59 The Process of Writing Grief
• 30:30 Form as Distance in Poetry
• 45:16 Translation Theory and Poetic Truth
• 1:06:04 Queer Theory and Poetic Erasure
• 1:20:40 The Courage to Describe the World

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:49

Hello and welcome to VAR blog, and today we're doing an arts episode and we're here with my friend Miller. Miller is the director of first year writing at Eugene Lang College, at the New School, and the author of two collections this one, impossible Things, which we're going to talk about today, and another one, the Unsteal One's Poems, which I believe came out from Princeton University Press. Right, am I right about that? And just a disclosure Miller and I went to school together. We both went. One of Miller's degrees is shared with me, so we know each other pretty well a long time ago. Welcome, miller. How are you doing today?

Miller W. Oberman: 1:36

I'm good. Thanks for having me. Yes, we went to school together, like 40,000 years ago, I think.

C. Derick Varn: 1:45

Yeah, during the heady days of the Bush administration. Oh. So, yeah, this is your, this is your second collection and it's a little different than than your first one in that this one feels, I mean, it's about a sustained personal topic topic. It's I would characterize it as a book link double elegy, which is an interesting thing to talk about because it's you processing your grief for your father through the grief your father had for a stillborn or died very young child.

Miller W. Oberman: 2:34

Yeah, child and son, I guess, yeah yeah, he um, he died in a drowning accident. Uh, my brother um, when he was two okay yeah um, so where did this?

C. Derick Varn: 2:51

you know? I mean, I was about to say where did this? You know? I mean, I was about to say where does this come from? And this book? That's actually an easy answer. Um, but oh, how is it? How is the process of writing this book different from your first book, which I which I think is, you know, not to say that it's less personal, but it is not tied up in like a singular event in the same way, yeah, Um, it's less personal, but it is not tied up in like a singular event in the same way.

Miller W. Oberman: 3:14

Yeah, it's funny, I think the processes are more alike in some ways than not, which maybe is surprising. My first book you're absolutely right, it's like definitely less personal or less like biographical probably is what I would say and it is comprised of about a third old English translations. And so I was, I was working, I was getting my PhD, I was studying old English poetry and I found that really the skills that I learned as a translator and the cool stuff that I learned about the kind of like childhood of our contemporary English language was like really influencing and affecting my language and my own poems, and so that book is kind of creates a mashup between those two things. My second book, which we're talking about today, in some ways the process was similar, which was that I worked with an exterior text. In the first book, that text was old English poems. In this book, the exterior text that I was working with was a memoir that my father was working on before he died, which he didn't finish and which is unpublished.

Miller W. Oberman: 4:35

Um, and I sort of yeah, I mean, it was a, it was a more, it was a more personal journey for sure I um really started. Uh, well, first I'll just say, um, say, I don't remember a time as a child that I didn't know that I had had a sibling who had died pretty tragically and mysteriously. And I was. I knew this, but it wasn't until I became a parent, when my first child was born in 2016, that I realized how much that had affected me. In 2016, that I realized how much that had affected me, and it moved from something that I thought about very much in a child way where, like, this is something that happened to my parent right, that like sort of has nothing to do with me, which is obviously not true, but that was how I thought of it.

Miller W. Oberman: 5:31

And then, when I had my first child, I realized that very, very quickly that I had been parented by someone traumatized by the loss of a child and that that was a huge part of what fatherhood was for me, and I was like quite panicked and anxious and in a way that is like somewhat unusual, and then kind of realized where it was coming from, remembered that my father had been working on this memoir which, luckily, my mother had saved like the single copy of, and so I really started from there. It was like one of those things where I was like, oh, I finally really want to have a conversation with my father about this and his experiences as an adult, um, but he had died in 2006. And so I couldn't talk to him, um, and so I went, um, you know, like writers and scholars do, I went to the text, um, and so I started with reading his book, and then that began a process which changed a lot as it went on, but it began a process of sort of like being in a conversation, poetically, with his text.

C. Derick Varn: 6:43

I mean, I did find it interesting how long it took you to approach this topic because, um, we've mentioned that we knew each other, um, a long time ago. Uh, I knew, like I knew you when your father died, um, and I I vaguely remembered it and I was like, oh, when I got this book, I was like I remember the, the instantiating event that you're talking about kind of happening, um, and I don't know if we ever talked about it, but I gathered at the time that we were in a motherfucking attitude together or an mfa, um, uh, that part of it was like, yeah, I remember a couple poems you weren't there were about this kind of grief, but in general you didn't approach it. You didn't approach the death of your father directly at all. Um, um and uh.

C. Derick Varn: 7:38

Having recently lost both my parents, I have actually discovered that it is really hard to write about um and not sound like a loon who's just writing your therapy papers. And that's not to say that there's anything wrong with writing your therapy papers, but I don't know that I can turn them into viable poetry easily. And so did you find that the having the intermediary text, even though it's about like, in some ways, an inherited primary trauma gave you a kind of distance to approach this, or, you know, or was it just time, I think a combination of those things you know like.

Miller W. Oberman: 8:19

First off, I'll say like I'm a person that like if we are getting into an argument over a beer about something that I like, if I'm being honest, I'll be like Derek. Actually I can't talk about this right now, but give me five years to stew and then I'll express something that makes sense. I'm really slow. You know, a professor that we shared, named Alice Freiman, used to read this quote to her students, a Rilke quote. She would read this long Rilke quote, which you probably remembered, eric. It's from the Journal of my Other Self and it's from the first section of that book and Rilke basically says like you have to go through all of these experiences in your life, and not just that, you have to have the experiences, but then you have to forget that you had them until they're like the blood within you, and then you might be able to write the first line of a poem. So there's a poem in this collection Impossible Things that I think where the title comes from, and that I think is probably the single poem in the collection that like, if it wasn't there I couldn't have written the book at all. That is the poem. That is a poem about my brother's shoes, shoes.

Miller W. Oberman: 9:59

And one thing I should say is that my brother, whose name was Joshua, was my father's child from his first marriage and not my mother's child's family. This was in 1972. They swooped into the house and my father's first wife was six months pregnant with their second child when this happened and the family swooped in and whether this was like their own thing or the prevailing idea of what to do in 1972, I don't know but they got rid of every single thing that had belonged to this toddler and, like swept the house clean of him like he had never existed. And I think to them like it was a path towards healing, probably. But my father, who was in a total daze, like years later, was on the phone with his father and was saying to him I'm so devastated that I don't have anything of Joshua's. And his father said oh, I stole a pair of his shoes before they emptied the house, would you like one? And so he gave my father this single, literal, you know, ked and my father put it in his closet with his shoes. And so I grew up like every time I would see in his closet there would be this little kid's shoe and with his shoes and I was just hyper aware of this and like, if something like that, if growing up with that kind of like symbolism doesn't turn you into an artist, I don't know what will Like. It may just be that that single shoe like set me on my path towards being a poet.

Miller W. Oberman: 11:52

I don't know, um, but I knew from the time I was in high school and I first started writing poems that I had to write a poem about this shoe. And I wrote a poem. I tried to do it in high school. I tried to do it so many times and these poems were so bad and I just I didn't know why, but I couldn't write anything about it.

Miller W. Oberman: 12:20

That was good. It was too sentimental, it was too close, it was too this or too that, or I wasn't connected to it in the right way and it wasn't until, like, so many years had passed and I was a parent. I think was a really important part of it. Being a parent myself, I think was a really crucial inroads to understanding enough a fraction of what my father would have experienced, what my father would have experienced, and so, like that distance was really, really important and, and I think, also the other thing that I did in that poem in the book is I used a form, and so I also found form really, really helpful in its kind of magic of distraction.

C. Derick Varn: 13:17

I want to say, um yeah, I don't know if I've answered your question at all, but you kind of have. I, I'm, I am, um, I am forced to think about my own process when we talk about this because, you know, our processes are very different. But similarly, I wrote a book which you have truly even read, like in graduate school, and called sometimes gray bodies, which is now a book, my first collection of poems called apocalyptics and, similar to you, um, I literally I mean, not everyone has this like weird experience, but I literally went out to the desert in Egypt when my ex-wife was diagnosed with stage four cancer and rewrote the entire book, like threw out 50 poems, poems. It felt like, I know there probably wasn't even 50 poems in the book, but it felt like I threw out 50 poems. I rewrote poems that had been stayed for a decade and it was weird because it was a process that another event caused me to have both the insight and the distance to go back and approach things that were really about my childhood and about, you know, the late nineties, um, and completely rewrite them. And, uh, I also thought of Alice Fryman because Alice would be like, you know, knowing this, this stuff with uh will happen to you and how it'll change your work and how like you might have a draft that you felt comfortable with or drafts that you know you couldn't like I I can't tell you how many actually also about my father. Uh, how many shitty poems I've written and destroyed about my dad. Um and um, the process of that is actually fascinating, both like as an artistic project and as a psychological one, and you know how uncomfortable I am with psychological stuff in poetry. We used to talk about it all the time, um.

C. Derick Varn: 15:21

So I also found that form helped. I mean both obvious forms like sonnets, and I mean I didn't know I was going to be writing fucking sonnets. I would if you told me that in 2005, I would have like laughed at you. So what kind of forms did you? You know I read this book and I was like kind of fascinated with its formalism. Both like the range of forms in this book, kind of interesting so. So how did that? How did that additional layer really help you create?

Miller W. Oberman: 15:53

Yeah, the poem that I was just talking about, joshua Was Gone, as well as another poem in the book and a couple of poems in my first book too, are using a form that I am just endlessly obsessed with and soon social you be um, called the beautiful outlaw, which is a new leapian form, or a new leapian form um, that I learned from the poet, darcy denigan. Um, who derek I don't know if you know darcy's work, but I think you'll probably like it um, um, very experimental, yet soulful Um, and I want to say kind of like vegetal also in some way. Um. She's a great poet but she taught me this form, um, and essentially it can. It's um, called the beautiful outlaw, or the belle absente, if you prefer it in French, and you take a word or a phrase. This poem is called Joshua was gone and you take a word or a phrase and then it's kind of like a reverse acrostic. So I used the word Joshua for this poem, so it has as many stanzas as our letters in the word Joshua.

Miller W. Oberman: 17:16

The first stanza uses every letter of the alphabet except for J. The second stanza uses every letter of the alphabet except for O. The third stanza every letter except for S and so forth, and so within your poem, you can never use the word or phrase that is your key, because there's always a letter that you can't use, and so it literally forces you not to name the thing that you're writing about. So it's truly a way of writing about absence through absence. But because it forces you to use all of those other letters, it makes you, as Harriet Mullen says, sleep with the dictionary. And so, because you're using, like, far more Zs and Xs and Qs and Js and all of these letters than you usually would, so it causes you to use words that are surprising to you because you have to. So, like, my notebooks will often be full of lists and lists and lists of words that have these letters in them for when I need them. And then the other thing that it causes because there's letters that you're disallowed from is that you go to use a word or a phrase and you can't, and so that causes you to either say something in a very unusual way, or it causes you to do other things, like cut words, have gaps right, um, have like moments of like things just being fucked up, or sometimes I've seen people use this form and just not use letters so like they'll just cut the letter from the word um and instead of being bird it will be BRD or whatever. But so, like in this poem, there's a lot of moments where you'll notice it now that I told you. But for example, there's a line in that's almost at the very end and the line is I must cry out my upness.

Miller W. Oberman: 19:32

This poem tells the story of my brother's shoe and it also tells the story of you. Know, we all think everything in our childhoods is like normal while you're in the middle of it, and then you grow up and you're like oh, I was locked in my room from the outside beginning when I was two, because my father's child wandered out of the house. I should have just put a whole content warning like 20 minutes ago. But my brother wandered out of the house with all of the doors and windows locked and was terrified of water, like hated a bath and wound up in the bottom of the neighbor's pool, and no one knows how it happened. And this was the like central mystery in some ways of my childhood. But so when I was two, my father put a like hook and eye lock on the outside of my door.

Miller W. Oberman: 20:26

And so when I woke up in the morning, I would have to call out and get somebody to come get me, and but I couldn't use the letter A in this stanza, so I couldn't say the thing that is what I used to say as a child, which is I'm awake, I'm awake, somebody come get me, I'm awake.

Miller W. Oberman: 20:42

And I couldn't say awake because I couldn't use A, and so I came up with I must cry out my upness, which is so much more arresting, I think, and unusual, and totally gets the idea across in a fresher way than I would have arrived at if I could have used all of the letters.

Miller W. Oberman: 21:03

And so it's an excellent form for writing about loss and grief, and I think you know this like gets towards something that I think we're both sort of dancing around a little bit, derek, which is like I think we share somewhat of a distaste for people using poetry either as a stand in for religion or as a stand in for therapy or romance or any of these things. Like I almost feel we have also both probably read a good amount of Boober Yep, I'm going to guess. So, like I don't see the, I don't objectify my own poems. I don't want to objectify a poem any more than I want to objectify another human being, and I don't use poems as a site for healing, although sometimes they do feel healing. But to me that's a side effect and in fact I recently joked with a old friend from my undergraduate days, another poet, that I go to therapy to write poems, not the other way around.

C. Derick Varn: 22:18

Yeah, yes, exactly.

Miller W. Oberman: 22:21

I was like, yeah, so I just think, like to use form can be profoundly helpful and not objectifying or like overdoing it in these ways. Objectifying or like overdoing it in these ways and I think particularly in this book where I'm writing about profoundly painful like subject, material and grief and the death of a child and of a parent, like it, it's not hard to be over the top.

C. Derick Varn: 22:48

Yeah, I, I remember again, the spirit of Alice Freiman is gonna like, uh, flow a lot through this discussion, I think. But I remember alice wrote a book when her mother died and, uh, I think I heard her read from it and this must have been like 2003, it was a long time ago, um, 2003. That was a long time ago, but I remember the way she talked about forms and drafting almost as a way of estranging the event from yourself. So instead of it being a therapeutic answer, it's actually a way to remove it from you and put it out in the world as a separate thing from your own experience, your own psychology, etc. And not to substitute it. Because the one thing I was just really impressed with, you know, with alice's poems as elegiac as they were, they didn't feel confessional. I just remember talking to both her and another teacher of ours, laura Newbern, about reading the 50s confessional female poets and then reading the letters, and just those letters, feeling ominous because they're objectifying themselves. It felt to me when I read the letters of Anne Sexton this woman's literally putting herself out to die on the page and while I love the work of anne sexton, I was like I don't ever, ever want to do that. That seems like I don't see the purpose of objectifying, because in some sense I'm not just objectifying the poem, I'm objectifying myself, um, uh, and the idea of form as a way to estrange yourself from that. Um, I think I kind of learned from alice and a little bit laura newbern too, and, um, I definitely was thinking about that.

C. Derick Varn: 24:43

Reading these books, I mean one of the things when you read a book from someone that you were working with in an early part of their, uh, artistic process and know personally, you're like, oh, this is fascinating where this has gone over 20 years, um and uh, I want to talk a little bit about this process. I mean, your first book took a long time to to get out. Uh, and actually I remember talking about this our cohort of poets basically all had their first books hit around a decade and change from when we finished our mfa, um, which to the average person sounds like forever, um, uh, but I think for us, is it I, if? I think, if I publish my like the original book that I that I wrote when I was in the MFA, like right out of school, it probably would have been shit, and I don't think all those poems are bad experience, to reconceptualize them and move myself away from them enough that I can make a call and like, well, this one doesn't belong here, or or I should. Really I should go further with this metaphor because I this is too precious to me personally, or whatever. Um, but I I do sometimes find that there is something like when people talk about the second album problem.

C. Derick Varn: 26:12

There's like a second collection problem where you know your first collection you've been ruminating on probably for an indirectly for decade, and then you know directly for like five years, and then your second book usually usually comes out a little easier. You're not usually waiting as long. Um, I don't think you and I mean this a compliment. It didn't seem like you had this problem here, so I wanted to ask you about, like, when did you start setting down to write these poems? Were they were, they did they kind of bubble up over the corresponding prior decade or where was this like an active cause? This is such a an integrated collection. Did you like sit down and just write it all straight? How did this happen?

Miller W. Oberman: 26:58

Yeah, um, that's a great question and I I think you know, in a way, weirdly, my second book is my third book because, like you, I had a collection I was working on when we were getting our MFAs. Um, my collection, my first collection, was called Useful and which you probably remember, and weirdly, like my two published collections, that that collection had, about a third of it was these persona poems in the voice of my grandfather, sort of a character, character based on my grandfather, and it's just like it's actually funny because I apparently I have a thing that I need to do where I like am in conversation with something or someone else in my work and I just can't be alone or something. But that collection very nearly was published. It was a finalist for the National Poetry Series two years in a row and a couple of other things too, and it just didn't get taken and at a certain point I was just like you know what? Fuck this? I'm just, I'm ready, I'm fine, I don't need this. And, like you, I now kind of look back and think you know, there were some really good poems in there that I would stand by, um, and I'm glad it wasn't published as my first book.

Miller W. Oberman: 28:20

At the time, I felt very resentful because I saw lots of books coming out that I was like, okay, I think my book is better than that book, Right, and I probably still think that. Um, but at the same time, I'm really, really glad that I kind of got time to have a more mature voice by the time the Unstolens came out, which was in 2017. And so I would say around, as you know, finishing a book and that book coming out there's a year or more More. Princeton was actually pretty quick, duke was really fast. They moved up my pub date actually, and I'm happy to talk about that process too. But mainly, I'll say I started working on impossible things after my first child was born in 2016. Um, and she was born. Rosie was born in December 2016.

Miller W. Oberman: 29:23

So, really beginning of 2017, I started working on this book, which was a little before my first book came out, and I was, like you know, staying up all night taking care of a baby, finishing my dissertation and like realizing that I was just like utterly freaked out in a way that I couldn't understand, just writing about it and um, and also I think you know anyone who has kids, you know this like it brings up all of your own childhood shit. Like they should just hand you a therapist when you have a baby. Like honestly, it's like unacceptable for people to parent without therapy. In my opinion, there's just no one that healthy and because you don't know, like you don't know the stuff that's going to come up and like through through parenting about your own childhood and so you know, I it came. It came quicker than than the last one, it did come easier but weirdly, you know, still not that fast.

Miller W. Oberman: 30:35

Like I worked on it from 2017 to 2023, which is like a chunk of years more than what a lot of people take, and I do work slow and I also have little kids, so like it's hard for me to find time to work, but I knew I knew a year in what the shape of the book was going to be and what I was doing, and you know, got a lot of really bad feedback telling me that I shouldn't do that and that, like poets don't do project books. Basically that, like the way to write a book of poems is to like write poems until you have 42 good ones or whatever Like and and that's just not how I work best. Um, so, and like the other thing I'll I'll just say is that, even though in some ways I worked on this book for six years and that's really clear Um, I also have a few poems in the book that I have been trying to write since I was like 15. And like in the context of this work. Finally those poems worked, and the one the beautiful outlaw that I was just talking about, joshua Was Gone, was a poem that I had had drafts of of, essentially a similar poem, since I was 15.

Miller W. Oberman: 31:55

And then another poem in the book called Theory, which is about an incident, a like fairly severe incident of bullying that I experienced when I was 10. Like, I wrote the first draft of that poem my first semester of undergraduate, when I was 18. Um, and then tried to write it multiple other times, like for like the following years, and it just never worked. Um, and it was too like, um, oh crap, my fire. Hold on one second.

C. Derick Varn: 32:34

All right. So I I became aware of this book when a kind of bizarre synchronicity happened, and I'm not a kind of woo-woo person, but I saw a poem I don't remember if it was in this collection or not published in Poetry Magazine with a poem by Darius Atafat. Now, for those who don't know us, darius Atafat is the son of one of my teachers. I believe you also worked with Susan. You did not work with Susan. So Susan Atafat or Susan Atafat Peckham, depending on when you find her work it was kind of strange to see Darius's work with your work, considering that Susan was kind of a ghost in our program. She I had worked with her, but most of the people in our program did not accident with one of her two children, leaving Joel Peckham, her husband and Darius behind. And what was it like to be published in? Like a weird like? I have to admit it must have been weird when you saw that on the back of poetry magazine.

Miller W. Oberman: 34:12

It was. Yeah, I never had the privilege of taking class with Susan, but I came to Georgia college to work with her and so I had come to check out the school and I'll just make a little like aside here for anyone like watching or listening who's considering going to an MFA program. Um, I went to Sarah Lawrence as an undergraduate and had a lot of um, worked with a lot of great poets and who are also fairly famous poets, like Marie Howe, who just won a Pulitzer, and the poet Thomas Lux. Jean Valentine was there and I was applying to MFA programs and my father was sick and so I wanted to move back. I was, I was briefly living on the West coast and the Bay area and I wanted to move back East.

Miller W. Oberman: 35:17

Um, and I was like, looking at MFA programs and you know, people around me were like, oh, you should apply to Iowa, you should apply to whatever Houston, you should apply to NYU, and I was like I don't want to be in any of those places and I realized that, a, I didn't want to go into debt for an MFA, which I don't recommend, and, b that at a lot of those places they're very not competitive to get into, although they are, but competitive. Within the creative workshopping environment, people, students, are competing to impress someone famous. You know, there's not enough to go around and I realized that I was more interested in attending a small program with a lot less of those kinds of like hierarchies to think about, and so I started looking just for little programs where I could afford to live and where I could get funding, with a couple of poets whose work I liked. And so I really researched that and I discovered Georgia College and I discovered Susan Atifat Peckham and read her work and like, read people writing about her teaching, and I just thought, you know, this would be a really great spot. And so I went to Georgia from California and I met her. I met a few other people in the program.

Miller W. Oberman: 36:51

I actually think I met Alice that day and she was just wonderful and I couldn't wait to study with her and I met, I think, all of their family. And so I, you know, applied and was accepted at Georgia College and was then showed up there to find out that and she was on a Fulbright in Jordan. It was devastating, like to find out that she had died and it was so just like utterly tragic, and I think it's funny that you just said she was a ghost over the program, because I really feel like in some ways my book is like about being haunted and like, yeah, I really felt like this was an absence, that was felt, and I had met Darius when he was like, I mean, not a toddler, but like barely like a really small five or six five yeah, really little um.

Miller W. Oberman: 37:59

And so I had a poem in poetry that is in this collection and I I picked up the magazine and I'm looking at and I think his poem was like the page after mine yep, they were back to back too, it was it was back to back, I saw his name and I was just like, oh my god, like it was incredible.

Miller W. Oberman: 38:19

I cried, I like I didn't know he was writing poetry, um, and he's a wonderful poet. And then it's quite good. Yeah, he's, he's wonderful. And I, I emailed him, I wrote him, um, and just congratulated him and like, but I was really, you know, I know, you know getting published in poetry is like awesome and a great accomplishment and everyone feels that way. And you know, you get it in the mail and you see who else you're with and it's like, oh my God, I'm in the same magazine with Jericho Brown or whatever. You know, like incredible. But I've never been like more moved to appear in a journal with anyone, I think ever. Then, when I saw Darius's palm, yeah, it was.

C. Derick Varn: 39:12

It was something else. So when this collection came out I was like, oh, I, I gotta check it out. Also would have checked it out anyway, but um, uh, but it is. It is interesting. Um, one of the things I find about your work, um, is that, um, some of the formal constraints aside, like the Joshua poem we discussed, I could tell. I actually didn't know what form it was, but I was like this is, this is estranged by some analogous form that I don't know, but your work is, is recognizable over a long period, but it has matured and it's hard to it's actually hard for me to put a finger on exactly how, like I I remember you mentioned your first book useful.

C. Derick Varn: 40:04

I remember the Myron poems, which are about your grandfather. Like I specifically remember them. I remember them. Some of them stand out in my head, like now, and it's over 20 years since I've seen them and reading these it did feel like an evolution of a similar process, but one that had a lot more inputs going into it, both in your personal life, but also like aesthetically, one of the things I mean cause he's explicitly mentioned, but Paul Salon is like another haunting presence in this book. How did that happen and has that changed? Has the influence of poets like Salon changed the way you write?

Miller W. Oberman: 40:58

That's a really good question. You know, it's rare that I experience like a one-to-one influence of that kind, like a one-to-one influence of that kind. There's one poem in my first book that like is so specifically influenced to me. That poem is a pseudo translation, like sort of an after, of an old English poem called Wolf and Ed Walker and it's like Wolf and Ed Walker is like. It's like Wolf and Ed Walker is like about sonnet length and this poem is like three pages long and Wolf and Ed Walker is a highly lyric. It's like a lyric poem in the voice of a woman from the year 800. It's one of only like two or three things written in old English in the voice of a woman which you can tell from the grammar Um and it's just a totally inscrutable lyric. And there are endless bad translations of it.

Miller W. Oberman: 42:11

And I made a translation of it which essentially was notes of frustration, after sitting at my desk for days trying to translate it. And it is done in this style where I attempt to hold open every possibility that exists within the poem without foreclosing it. And I did that after having been absolutely obsessed with reading the novelist Javier Marias, who writes in these extremely long sentences and does this thing where it's like it could be this, it could be this, it could be this, it could be this, and and like refuses to foreclose possibility, and so that's a poem that I like wrote that and I was like, oh shit, I was reading too much Javier Marias and like I felt like that really helped me get that poem the way I wanted it. But I think like for the most part, I find myself to be more the relationship that I feel like I have with poets who are really important to me, and there's so many, I think the poems in this book.

Miller W. Oberman: 43:26

One thing that is different about it than my previous work is it's far more referential to other texts and and artists and poems and like there's like fresco poetry, there's like a lot of interaction, and so I would more say that like I'm in conversation with Paul Ceylon and that that's where the influence is, rather than that like my poems do anything in terms of voice or form or like anything the line like I don't know that I see his work in my work, except that I'm quoting it in my work and talking about it. But like oh my God, if I could write a poem like Paul Ceylon, I would empty my bank account to do that. You know what I mean. Like I, he's incredible, but yeah, I don't. I don't think influence quite shows up. It's more, it's more interactive, I think. For me, yeah, it's more interactive, I think, for me.

C. Derick Varn: 44:34

Yeah, I've become incredibly interested in Paul Solano, also reading him in German and French, which I don't really read French kind of fake it and I have been interested since your first book in the way translation plays in your work.

C. Derick Varn: 45:02

We both took a translation class together and that class was how I realized I was obsessed and highly influenced with Latin American poetry and with Eastern European poetry. But, how you know, in this book it's a lot less obvious than your first collection because you're not like. You know, you're not working with English, for example, but do you find any of those skills that you have picked up from translation? Obviously, you went on to do a lot more of it after we studied it. I mean, you, you know you get a phd in english focusing on anglo-saxon literature. It's like not, that's a, that's like an all translation all this times kind of deal. Uh, how do you find that that translation actually affects your poetry, and particularly when it comes to stuff like having a dialogue with a dead poet from a hundred years ago who wrote in languages that you don't like speak as your native one?

Miller W. Oberman: 46:02

Yeah, so much I feel like the work that I did, reading translation theory and especially reading queer theory. As pertains to temporality, I wrote my dissertation, which basically is the Unstill Ones includes a scholarly preface which is not available for anyone to read I don't think, or at least it's like still embargoed, but I never published anything from it and I thought about, you know, turning it into a monograph, but I don't. My time is limited, especially as a parent, and I like don't feel as drawn towards the scholarly projects, like if I have time I'm gonna spend it writing poems, um, or drafting, or like researching stuff for poems, um. But the scholarly preface that I wrote was really about the way that I used queer theory and particular, like temporality theory within queer theory, in conjunction with translation theory as a translator of old English, and thinking about like queer, time and time travel and communication in these ways and the ways that that influenced me, which it did a lot, and I feel like it really changed my approach towards writing and reading, and I think so.

Miller W. Oberman: 47:43

What I did in Impossible Things is I took this was actually a very late change, very late change. I interspersed passages from my father's unpublished memoir with my own poems and they kind of speak back and forth to each other. As you'll see if you read the book, and at first what I did was like the only editing that I did was just in choosing those passages and I really just carefully chose the ones that I thought of his were the best written. And I really just carefully chose the ones that I thought of his were the best written, because I didn't write this book to be an asshole to my dad even though sometimes I'm really pissed at him still and that comes through in the book. But like, at first I was just editing via extraction and pretty late in the process I just didn't feel it was working.

Miller W. Oberman: 48:35

I didn't feel the passages were compressed enough or strong enough, and so I started turning them into erasure poems and that was just enormously helpful and I thought of it as an act of translation, thought of it as an act of translation. I thought of it as translating my father into something that I could, my father's writing, into something that I could understand and that spoke to me and that spoke to my work. But I also thought of it as compressing what he had written to come closer and closer to revealing, if I could, his emotional truth, and so I didn't think of it as changing what he was doing. Often, erasure is an act of violence. I think most erasure projects, and most of the best ones, are made by people erasing texts that are violent as an act of resistance, and you know rebellion and response, and this was not that. This was really, really an attempt to translate his text into poetry and into a more emotional clarity than I think he had when he was working on it, but he didn't have the chance to revise.

Miller W. Oberman: 50:07

And my father loved poetry and in fact there's a lot of poetry in his book. He often starts a chapter with a poem someone else's poem, thankfully.

C. Derick Varn: 50:26

One of the things and I mean this as a compliment, but I remember back in our MFA days and again, this is the advantage of an interviewer who has personal access to our experiences together we were both highly theoretically informed poets and you bring this up. Like you know, I was very informed at the time by Baudrillardian concerns and stuff like that. But I remember one of the poets and teachers at our school. They often disagreed with Martin Laman, but he told me once you should read all that theory and it should inform your poetry. But I should not know that that theory is there when you read your poetry and I wanted to say, like outside of the one direct quote of gender trouble, um, um, yeah, this book has that advantage. It feels very like because I know you. I do know that it's very theoretically informed, but I could read it and not know that at all.

C. Derick Varn: 51:40

Yeah, um, how do you bring queer theory in? I mean, you mentioned a little bit about the way it functions with translation and actually that's something I have thought about a lot. Some of the best texts on translation I've gotten from the queer bookstore, uh, seriously, because they are related. Um, yeah, um, but what kind of theory went into this book specifically, like any theorist. And then how did you hide it?

Miller W. Oberman: 52:09

you know yeah, I mean, I don't know, I certainly didn't try to hide anything and I do think I like I couldn't disagree more with what marty said to you in that moment and I I don't know whether he would still agree with himself, um or not, but he might not, um, but I think you, to me, what makes the best translation is an honest one, and I think what infuriates me about translation is the way that it can be used as an act of erasure. When I realized the way that people were translating poems that had been damaged. And in the Exeter book, which is a book, there's one copy of okay One, just one that contains, you know, 75% of Old English poetry, and there's one copy of it and someone who had it at some point laid a hot poker down on it and so it has these burned sections all throughout it, and the book was opened when the hot poker was laid on it. So it has this like kind of beautiful butterfly, like pattern. How drunk you have to be to set down a hot poker on the Exeter book. I can only imagine that's the only way I can like begin to forgive.

Miller W. Oberman: 53:42

But there's this poem in the Exeter book called the ruin, which is a poem in the voice of someone. This was probably written, you know, around between 800 and 900 ish. The person discovers the ruins of a city that are more advanced than anything they can imagine. They're seeing the ruins of a Roman city from like a thousand years before. And this is not an experience we have, right, like the closest thing we have is like when you go see a movie about aliens and you find there's like tech in a cave, right, like that is from 75 years ago, but it's like tech beyond our wildest dreams, like, but we don't actually have those experiences. So this poet is just describing this ruin and they're they're unbelievably impressed by it. They're like how could the people who made this have allowed it to become a ruin? Like what could have happened? And they're just describing it.

Miller W. Oberman: 54:42

And this poem is damaged in multiple places by the hot poker, and so there are all these gaps in it where the poem has been burned and it's about a city being burned, right, and so there's these sections that are just missing, and because Old English poetry is highly formal, you can tell to a breath, right, exactly how much is missing in which space, which is cool, and I had read a couple translations of this poem. It was the poem that made me want to read Old English. It's just so unbelievably gorgeous and moving. And then I looked at it in Old English and I saw how much was missing. And then I looked back at the translations and how they covered up that these chunks are missing. They just elide this damage so that you can't see it.

Miller W. Oberman: 55:35

And as a trans person, I like lost my mind. I was like, oh, you think this thing is damaged and so you're going to put on another suit of clothing on it to make you feel comfortable. And so the translations, which I had previously been impressed by, I was enraged by. And so that's when I started, and I think you know, when I translate a text, I'm very careful to say this is a totally literal translation, as best as I could do, or a literal translation wasn't possible here, so I went in another direction. But being clear about those things and I think that's why I disagree with Marty, you know, it's not about hiding your work, and in fact a lot of times it's about showing it, like showing those bones which are amazing. Showing those bones which are amazing, and I think how much closer, you know, we can be to each other and to texts and to everything that's good and beautiful in this world, is by looking at as close as possible, to being able to see the other, to being able to see what is and, if we don't understand it, to be able to be like, oh, I don't understand this, but I'm not going to fill it up with something that I do understand, because that changes it and that objectifies it, and so I think that was something I really learned through my process with Old English and that continues to like bear on my work and I think theoretically. So, yeah, I mean, I like there's a, there's a double epigraph.

Miller W. Oberman: 57:20

At the beginning of the book there's a quote, and one of the one of the quotes is from this amazing drag performer whose name is vaginal cream davis. And um, that that quote is, and actually the first quote above it is from that portion that alice read to us from journal of my other self. So it's rilka. And then it's this quote from a drag performer, performer, vaginal cream davis, who says I've always felt sorry for those with only one limited way of viewing their past.

Miller W. Oberman: 57:57

She claims to have been conceived under a table at a Ray Charles concert, which may or may not be true, but in any case, I think that, like that, she I don't know if you know, like this whole story, derek, but she was essentially the like muse of one of the most important queer theorists of our time, jose munoz, who sadly died too young and wrote about her extensively Um, and so I think, like those are the ways that, um, you know, I think theory like undergirds, um, the collection, the collection. And you know, sometimes I I notice things that are referential, that probably only I'm seeing, and that's okay, but sometimes, but I also, like, never tried to hide anything, you know, I appreciate that.

C. Derick Varn: 59:10

I actually think I'm thinking about a debate I have in my head going going back 20 years, about translation, because we were taught one school. I remember being being taught like, the poetry translation philosophy of, like, uh, coleman bartz and robert bly, where you don't even necessarily speak the language and I was just, I remember being frankly pissed, yeah, um, and I was given an exercise and I believe you were in this class where we were asked to translate a poem from a language we don't know. Yeah, and I chose Romanian because it's close to Spanish, a language I do have a working understanding of and tried to work from there. But I now am sort of frustrated by that idea that every translation is an act of creation. I'm like, yeah, but that doesn't give us the license to just make the past say whatever the hell I want it to.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:00:10

No, and it's a colonial impulse, right? No, and it's. It's a colonial impulse, right? Like, like it's not, it's not just like overdoing art, and I remember that exercise and it's like a sort of fun creative writing exercise. Like I think I chose Greek and I don't read that alphabet, you know what I mean. So I chose something that I really knew, and it's funny because I actually do understand some greek, because I grew up with my uncle who's greek, um, and so I can like pick out words, but like I don't know that alphabet, so I I like was like this is a joke, you know what I mean. Like I'm, you know it's about being. It's like a theater exercise, right, where we're all going to go, oh, and like try to loosen up, but as a practice it's like sort of politically bankrupt, I would say.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:08

I would say it's politically bankrupt and scholarly problematic at minimum.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:01:14

Absolutely Like absolutely.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:16

Like yeah, yeah, I just think about Coleman Bartz and Rumi, and I don't, you know, I've met Coleman Bartz, but I just remember thinking, like you are the representation of Rumi to millions of Americans, and yet how much Persian is reflected in this as a cultural references are stripped out Like um, it makes it far more, you know, uh, it reads a lot more like uh, I don't know generic, like new age poetry than it should. And this actually does make me angry now and it didn't when I was in college, but it does now because I'm just like so I don't really have access to roomie. I have access to coleman bart, roomie, which is a creation, kind of um, and and not that I would have pure, unadulterated, real access to roomie unless I spoke, like I, I don't know whatever century Persian and that specific dialect. But I do think we can approximate it and try to get there and make the strangeness remain and not, you know, yeah, I'm okay, with footnote, to explain a historical context. I don't know, I just don't have a problem with it and maybe having people who are, you know, more conversant and modern Persian give influence into this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:48

The other thing I remember about that translation class when we learned from the Robert Bly School and I don't mind slagging Robertbert blythe directly, so I'll just be clear about this one um was like the use of literal translators and not really crediting them. So you would find a native speaker who would uh, give you a word for word, like translinear translation, which would be a grammatical in english, and like I wouldn't want to publish that either. But then the poet would come in and fix it as if the poet's magic poet-ness would make this readable. And then often the fact that the literal translinear translation was done by usually a scholar from that region or country. They will probably get a thanks in the book, but it's probably not acknowledged that they're the people who did the actual language translation. And this practice set me afire. Even then I was just like wait, what, like I mean that's so colonial. It's not not even funny and not just in the history of colonial way, like it's actively still perpetuating itself.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:04:04

Um, absolutely exactly. And, um, you know, I think it's called a crib sheet when they do that. That's what we always called it. Um, when I was like sort of medieval studies adjacent, like that's how most, um, medieval translations are made. Um, the translation of the ruin that I'm talking about was in a book where everything was done that way. Um, and so, yeah, some a medievalist like wrote down a word-for-word translation and gives it to a poet who doesn't know old English, and the translation in that book of that poem who I am not here to slag was Yusuf Komunyaka, who's a poet who.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:04:54

I respect all day long and what he made was beautiful, but he didn't have access to the language at all and you know, so much of poetry is sound and rhythm and you have to know, you have to know and like there's a translation in that I have in the end still ones of a different um that I have in the instillments of a different poem, that I have a note at the end of the book that just includes the old English for this, like two lines, cause I was just like I couldn't approximate the sound and it's gorgeous in old English, it's absolutely gorgeous, and I couldn't make it work so that it sounded even close, right, and it just bothered me so much. But it should, right, it should bother us. I'm thinking about um, oh, who's the, who's the scholar that I'm thinking of? Um, it'll come to me. But I'm thinking of an article that a translation studies article that I read that was like really, um, really important Um, oh, it's just going to bother me. Wait, I'm going to look it up, okay.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:21

But you asked me, you ask me anything. Why are you looking that up? I was, it's funny, I wasn't expecting us to talk so much about translation here, but I do think it's. It's vital.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:29

And I wanted to mention something that when you first and it was you who got me thinking about this had me read ann carson's uh translation of sappho and I love I thought I loved sappho and I did not realize from the translations of sappho that I had gotten, prior to the ann carson one, how much of it was fixed like that, that like half those poems are fragments and we get the fragment and they tell you it's a fragment but you can't tell from the poetry translation where where the missing stuff is.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:04

And when you gave me that uh Ann Carson book, she actually make sure you know this is gone, this is gone, this is gone, this is gone, like, um, and that was a wild experience to me and that you know that you know. Now it seems so basic, but like it was a revelation, cause I was, I was like I actually appreciate knowing that there's a gap here and I appreciate what that does poetically, but I also appreciate what that does is just me knowing that I don't really totally understand this poem. Like, yeah, appreciate what that does.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:07:39

is just me knowing that I don't really totally understand this poem, like, um, yeah, totally, and like she does a really good job of that, right, and she does a variety of kinds of translation, um, and sometimes you pick up a book of hers and it like just is a very scholarly translation from ancient greek, yep, and sometimes, sometimes it's some made up, crazy shit Absolutely, and you don't know what it's going to be, but you do know that, whatever it is, she's going to tell you right, and like she's done the work.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:12

Yeah, I don't mind the made up crazy shit translation. When I'm told it's a made-up crazy shit translation, like I do not mind when someone's like this is a, a re, uh, an adaptation, because then I know like you're running with it, like I know that like you're going going nuts, I'm not reading this to get the original. You know, like with a poet that's unfortunate, it-influential on me but I like to refer to as the old fascist because he was, is Ezra Pound and I remember realizing what the hell he did to Chinese poetry and, unfortunately for me for a long time, a lot of Poundian translations which do not admit that he didn't really understand medieval Mandarin and that some of his translations are really just glosses. They have none of the form, some of the contents filled in, etc. And I don't mind that if you tell me none of the form and some of the contents filled in, et cetera.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:19

And I don't mind that if you tell me right, like, cause you know we can, definitely you're right, and Carson does that all the time. But she does tell you like when she's like when she's like I don't know she got an Oedipus play and just like buck wild with it, versus when she's giving you something as close to the original as she can do. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, I just I find it interesting because this seems to be a theme in your work in particular, going back as long as I've known you like this, this tension between translation and and knowability, and trying to both communicate these things but also make it known. There's parts of it you can't. And yeah, I, I think it's interesting how much it affects your actual poetry, like not just your translation work yeah, I mean, I think, um, yeah, because it's all.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:10:18

It just all is a translation and I think you know, at the risk of words starting to lose their meaning, to say that, but communication is really hard and words are already metaphors, right, like if we think about sign, signifier, signified, type stuff. Words are already not complete, they're gestural, of that of the fallibility of language itself and at the same time, I consider myself a fairly non-experimental poet, a very literal, I feel like a fairly hyper-literal approach most of the time. Hey, I'm going to tell you a story. This thing happened and here's what it felt like and here's what I thought about, or you know things like that and I, you know I don't usually embrace the surreal that much. I'm like quite focused in some ways on describing the world as I see it. And and you know it's funny, there's a moment in my book where I actually removed I removed the poet's name who said this thing to me in the poem, but it was Marie Howe and Marie, when I took a class with her as an undergraduate which I didn't get into, took a class with her as an undergraduate which I didn't get into, and it was like my last chance to take a class with her.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:12:04

She had been on leave and then I just didn't get into the class and I had a very sad miniature sit-in of one in the president's office and I was just like I'm really sorry, but I'm not going to leave you alone until you let me take this class Like it's not happening. And Marie agreed to let me take the class as like one over the limit. And the president then agreed, since Marie had, but Marie forbid us from using any expository writing. Basically, for the semester she was like just describe. You don't have to do anything other than describe the world that you see and experience around you to make meaning. You're not capable of not making meaning and so practice just describing before you go on to say what you think or how you feel or anything like that. And we were all like that's not possible, you know. But we did it and it and, like you know, it's something that I still come back to, in sort of the same way that I think often about that little forward at the beginning of Anna Akhmatova's poem Requiem, where she says you know where she's going to stand in front of a prison every day, right in Stalingrad, and with, like thousands of other people whose families are prisoners. And there's just this little foreword before the poem that says I went to stand outside the prison every day and then when a lady recognized me and said, are you the poet, are you Akhmatova? And I said yes, and she said, can you describe this? And I said yes, you know.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:13:56

And then there's like a beautiful untranslatable line, I think that says something like and something like a smile passed over what had once been her face, you know, type thing, and it's just like. I really think it's very, in some ways it's very old fashioned, but I think that's the poet's job to describe this and to keep practicing describing things so that when you really need to, you have those tools. And that's why it's not a totally navel-gazing endeavor, right, like at all. It's really important and because we all know, whether or not we are artists, how good it feels to hear a song or see a painting or read a poem that describes a thing you felt and never experienced described before, and how meaningful that is as a part of life. But yeah, I think so. Like, on one hand, I feel totally aware that language is inadequate, like completely inadequate, and then, on the other hand, I'm like I'm still using it to try my best to describe like what I can.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:15

On that note, I know you have to go and I want to plug your book impossible things, duke university press. But I actually want to give you a compliment and something I've never told you. Um, uh, it was working with you and alice freiman. Uh, you remember maybe you do my my love of language, poetry and this, the playing with the idea that language is insufficient all the time, which I still do. But it was you and Alice and I, specifically you and Alice, who, because you loved a lot of those same poets as me, and yet you would write these highly descriptive, deceptively plain, like they were very deceptively plain.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:01

And I realized that as we worked together, poems often about just observations and I I often attribute you and Alice for me being willing to touch narrative at all or do anything. You, you know, comprehensible, um, uh and uh, it was that, that impulse that you have to just be like. We can understand the weird, we can know the limitations of language. We didn't even call that out, but we are going to try to be descriptive, um, or at least give enough narrative and description for someone to be able to invest in it. Um, and I really do think the two of you really gave me the freedom to do that, whereas beforehand I was rebelling against. You know, uh uh, school of Poetry, that 70s like like male confessional mode, and it was nice for someone to be like no, you don't have to make every poem unreadable. Yeah, like, get to some semiotic point that you're trying to make.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:17:21

You were like. You were like the Alex P Keaton of poets.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:17:27

Yeah, I was like, yeah, I think that I mean honestly, thank God that show was made. It's so helpful as a reference point. Thank you, family Ties. But, like you know, I think you're right to rebel against that, right to rebel against that. And at the same time you know, I'm trying not to quote TS Eliot right now Like from you know, in tradition and the individual talent, when he's like having a fake argument with an unknown young poet who's like why do we have to read the poets that came before?

Miller W. Oberman: 1:18:17

We know so much more than they do. And he's like, yes, we have to read the poets that came before. We know so much more than they do. And he's like, yes, of course you know more than they do because you know everything that they knew, because they wrote it down. So you're standing on the shoulders of giants type thing, and I really have a lot of appreciation for some of that type of poetry.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:18:42

And at the same time, I think a poet whose work meant a lot to me and who I learned a lot from as an undergrad was Thomas Lux, and one of the things that I learned from him and this sort of gets to maybe like a question that you asked me earlier about, like my own works progression, but, like as a young person, I had a lot of ideas about what poetry was supposed to be like, either, um, copying what other people were doing, or saying that I should do, or in rebellion against it, like, oh, this person says you have to do this, so you should definitely never do this Right, or you have to do this for that. And so my head was really full about, like, what poems should look, like, what topics they could address, like how much pain there needed to be in them. Like you know, all pain needed to be in there, like you know all pain needed to be in there. And Tom was like really taught me that you get to be your whole self on the page, and like he really helped me to bring my sense of humor to the page, which there's actually, I think, a surprising amount of humor in Impossible Things.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:20:07

Even though it's like a very dark book, there's like a lot of humor in it, I think, and that really, like you know, I think that's like related to the story that you're telling about me and Alice. Like you don't have to cut anything out or just be reactive to this or that Like and those impulses as a teacher now myself, I would say to you, if you were my student, you know I would be like the impulses that you're having are very important to listen to. The fact that you're rebelling against all of this bullshit says everything good about you and the future of your work, and it can't only be reactive that way. You have to do other stuff too and like, listen to your gut and follow it, but also like you don't have to only be doing that one thing and you can. You can be your whole self on the page, um, and I think that is something that I have embraced.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:21:00

You know, as time has gone on and like you know, in Impossible Things it's the first book that I worked on completely outside of any classroom experience, like I was not in a workshop, nobody was looking at the poems, nobody was giving me feedback, nothing. Um, and I think in some places, like I gave myself a lot more string um rope or whatever than usually I would have, because I was like there's nobody here to be like miller, you're this kind of a poet. You don't do this. You know, mart Marty told me not to write sonnets. He told me that I was a free verse poet In a way, I'm grateful because it caused me to be like, go harder at form, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:56

For people who don't know, martin Lamin is sort of uh, he's a friend of mine now, but he was sort of a bet, nor back one thing I'll say about marty lamin, and you know, marty, if you're listening, this is like from the heart.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:22:12

Um, like I think there. I don't know that I've experienced a better line editor than Marty Simon.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:22:23

I mean unbelievable, like if you have a poem that's close, he would just take it and show you exactly how to cut what you needed to cut and to like shift a line break to get every ounce of power out of something. And I learned so much from that and I will never be as good of a line editor as he is Like he has such a gift for it, but like I think that that desire to edit actually sometimes like came through in ways that were less helpful.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:58

Yeah, yeah, actually, sometimes like came through in ways that were less helpful. Yeah, yeah, um, we'll end on on that note. On a positive note, um, uh, I really do think people should pick up this book. Um, I, if you're not half of my audience, well, about a third of my audience is interested in the arts and the other my audience is really in theory and politics. But I, I think, if you're intimidated by poetry, despite the fact that this is formally complicated, this is not an intimidating book, and I mean that as a compliment, because I do actually think it's a complicated book, both emotionally, textually, uh content and and formally. But I don't think, I think a reader doesn't have to. I think you can't actually read this without that knowledge and have an awakened interest in that knowledge for you and, um, that's one of the best things I can say about a book of poetry.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:23:47

So thanks, millie yeah, I really appreciate that and I wanted it to be accessible in that way and, like you know, that's one of the reasons why the book actually begins and ends with two short essays, which probably shocked you, derek you were like it did.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:02

Actually I was like I was like wait, there's a, there's an essay here, there's an epilogue, there's a whole epilogue, yeah.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:24:12

So it definitely, like you know, there's a lot of storytelling, um, and um, yeah, I think, I think that you know. If you're a person who, um, I'll just say this, like, maybe in closing, to my father my father would the book that he was writing, the memoir that he was working on before he died, which was very bad, um, I should say, and he knew it, but he didn't have time to work on it, the book he was writing before he died. His purpose in writing that book was to say to other people who had lost a child you are not alone and people who had experienced, like, really serious grief and guilt. When his son died in 1972, there was not a counseling group or like you know anything. He was just totally isolated with this guilt and grief and shame.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:25:14

And he describes things in the book like people crossing the street to avoid him, um, after his child died because of, like, either superstition that it would like rub off or just cause they couldn't possibly handle speaking to someone who is in that much pain. Um, and he wanted to write the book to like, create community and say to people like I experienced this and like this is honestly normal, you know, and um, I. I like to think that in some way, my book um finishes in a really different way than he would have. What he was, the project he was trying to do, um, and so if you're a person who's like processing family grief and generational trauma of any kind, like um, you know, I think it might interest you whether or not you like poems.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:05

yeah, yeah, all right. Um miller, where can people find your work in addition to this book?

Miller W. Oberman: 1:26:11

um, I have a website, and which is probably let me just start typing um is probably millerobermancom. What is my website? It's millerwolfobermancom. Um, and you can also find my work up at like a variety of spots. Um, certainly, a lot of poems from this book were in Poetry Magazine, along with other places. But, yeah, you can find links to my work on my website and you can follow me on vile social media platforms like Instagram that are not fun anymore but where we some of us still go.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:56

Yeah would say. Instagram and tiktok are two of the lesser levile ones too. That's the sad thing, um it's true, I don't.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:27:07

I don't tiktok, but I am sort of still on instagram. But yeah, if you're interested in my work, go to my website. There's a lot of links to poems, um, you know, and you can find my book at duke university press or, um you know, any anywhere you know that sells books usually, so I can't recommend the site.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:30

That starts with the letter a of course, yeah, the powells you got. Powells is safe, right, powells hasn't, like yeah, supported anything terrible lately.

Miller W. Oberman: 1:27:40

Oh, this is great, house is great. And what's that other one? Um, you know, the one that supports uh, bookshop, bookshop, yeah, bookshop yeah, it's good too, yeah all right thank you so much. Thank you, derek. It's so nice to talk to you it's nice talking into bye.