Living Through Madness, Of Coming Back
A review of Jim Miller's poetry collection, "Into the Bardo"
By Tamara Johnson
Many know Jim Miller as a fiction writer, a muckraker, a historian, a union organizer; or maybe as a professor, an editor, a lecturer; others, of course, know Miller as a husband or father. He’s a good friend and a lot of other things too—including a Dead Head, which I don’t understand.
Still, when I read Into the Bardo (Kelsay Books) I felt, in my arrogant and tiny way, that here at last is the true person. When I say in my arrogant and tiny way, I mean that this is the person I’ve always known. We’re all made up of such multifaceted parts that it’s easy to think we know the truth about anybody. One day you hear a eulogy and you realize that you kind of missed your chance to know your mother in the way that her nursing school buddies knew her long before you were born. Before you were even a thought to anybody ever.
Into the Bardo refers to antarābhava or, according to some Bhuddhist traditions, that specific time of suspension between one life and the next. Of reincarnation. I became aware that Jim was about to be wheeled into the operating room to receive his new liver only because I had texted his wife, Kelly, from Belmont Park. Whatever that text contained, it could only have been a trivial matter by comparison, but Kelly kindly texted me back.
I was in the middle of escorting a group of international tweens around the amusement park, and we were altogether imitating the idea of a group of people about to have fun. The attempt, one of my very first after the Covid lockdown period, was only sort of working. As a good friend once said about the AIDS crisis: the edges of things had become sharper, the colors more vibrant.
*****
In the title poem we meet nurse Jeff, who turns out to be Jim’s neighbor. Later in the collection there’s a poem dedicated to Jeff, “The Big Dance.”
“In the hours before dawn,/as I lay awake listening,/they played a lullaby/when a baby was born on another floor…”
Sometimes I would hear the wailing/of a grieving family/and other times,/just the sound of the wheels/creaking as they rolled…”
I don’t believe in a lot and I’ve given Jim shit over the years for his earnest faith in human kindness, but there’s something about Bardo Thodol or Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State that always rang true.
I experienced it in fact with my own mother, who rallied herself out of some unknown state, to greet us when we finally arrived to say our goodbyes to her. I don’t think her care staff, including the doctors, believed us when we told him she had raised herself in joy at the news that my little brother and I had driven through the night together: “Oh my word!” she had said, so characteristically.
That was the night of the day I learned most of what I know about my brother, maybe because it was the only chance we’d ever had to spend the time in extended silence.
*****
Into the Bardo is a joyful book of living through madness, of coming back to a “lawn full of rabbits…hawks soaring the canyons…my wife’s hand…as my gait became steady.” I’ve enjoyed so much of what Jim’s done over the years (I just recommended Under the Perfect Sun, for example, the book he co-wrote with that same wife and with the late writer Mike Davis, to one of my high school students), but I think this is Miller’s best work. There’s a devotional element to it that I might have rejected when I was a young asshole, but which now I appreciate enough that I want to build an entire course around it.
When The Dharma Bum Temple opened in its new location on Normal Street in Hillcrest, I stopped by out of curiosity and found Jim and his young son together on the front row cushions. At that time Walter, to whom this book is dedicated, had been through his own dance with death. That it took a complete re-birth for Jim to become a poet again is my little joke that I made for myself because I knew Jim was a poet before this Walter person was even born. But for all I know, Walter knew the poetry before I did. That’s the kind of mystery we all live with. No one ever knows shit until the shit hits the fan.
This book can be considered akin to some of my favorite devotional poetry: Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Robinson Jeffers, Adelia Prado, Aime Cesaire. By which I mean that all poetry is devotional and that the face of the poet is always our true face. The rage and kindness that defines the human spirit is here in full. But so is the otherworldly, the mysterious, even the godly. In “The Gift,” Jim thanks his donor, “the beloved stranger,” who lives in him through an act of grace made under the most miserable of circumstances. That such moments are possible is what this good book is all about.
Jim Miller will be reading from his two new poetry collections, Into the Bardo and Paradise and Other Lost Places, on Thursday, November 14th at 11:10AM-12:35PM in the Black Box Theater at San Diego City College and on Thursday, November 21st at 7PM at The Book Catapult (3030-B Juniper Street in South Park; 619-619-795-3780).
Tamara Johnson has lived in five different apartments on the same three blocks, but not consecutively. She is the author of Not Far from Normal, a hybrid work (2014, San Diego City Works Press).