Poetry Collection Review: Sid Miller & Organ Meat

Within Miller’s poetry collection How Can I Love You (If You Won’t Lie Down?), we are introduced to a speaker who is not always pleasant, and in turn this speaker introduces us to an environment that is not always pleasant. We see the speaker struggle with a sense of belonging, not only within a community and nature, but also within the gender expectations of manhood and his own perception of himself. He longs for acceptance from all of these spaces, and the disconnect from them builds a theme of violence and incongruity that can be tracked throughout the collection, only mellowing as we near the final few poems in which a level of understanding that approaches, yet never quite reaches, contentment lies. This remaining lack of contentment or comfort is represented both in the way organic and inorganic imagery clash throughout the collection, as well as the absence of resolution to various forms of violence. While we do see a shift throughout the collection, a lift that offers some hope, we are never truly satisfied with the place we are left, nor is the speaker. 

        Miller’s first poem, “Exile on Foster,” embodies many if not all of the major themes within the collection: violence, a disharmonic environment, and the longing to belong in this environment/community and within the self. This poem is also our introduction to other motifs that carry throughout the collection, from religion to food to birds. Structurally, there are no stanza breaks, showing a continuity between all of the mentioned themes. It sets the scene for all poems to follow, and one of the ways it does this is by situating the violence at the beginning of the piece, showing the reader what it means to live on Foster and to live as the speaker does--it is not peaceful, nor friendly; neighbors only gather together when someone has been killed. The murder is a blanket of heaviness over the poem, but beyond the first few lines that establish the event, it is hardly relevant to the speaker--he is focused more on the appearance of the neighbors, gathering “at the end of the block / for the first time…” (7-8). The novelty of the community materializing overrides any question of who was killed or why. The speaker turns away from the murder and looks to the community, then to his individual self. In the speaker’s consideration of these things, we see multiple levels of the struggle to live contently:

I suppose the lesson I was meant to learn

was that anyone can make a home 

out of anything, so long as you’re comfortable

with your lot. But the rest of us

don’t seem comfortable. I toss and turn

at night. Everyone fidgets with their fingers. (36-41)

In this section, the “lot” that one is meant to find comfort in takes on a dual meaning: it is both the literal space that one occupies by living in it, and also the collection of people in one’s community. Without the latter for consideration, an occupied lot is already a house; to make a home requires more--the comfort, the connections. The speaker’s observation of his neighbors’ discomfort in addition to his own--”the rest of us”--lends itself to this dual meaning. This issue is not limited to the speaker and his personal sleep issues when we see that “everyone fidgets with their fingers.” The early lines of the poem tell us that Foster is a dangerous place to live while the later half tells us, in much more detail, that it is horribly lonely.

Looking into the imagery of “Exile on Foster,” Miller pairs the misfit speaker with a misfit environment that reflects the speaker’s discomfort:

I came here out of circumstance

and am now surrounded by organ meat,

diesel fuel, rusted radiators, dandelions,

overgrown rhododendrons covered

with dead blooms, pitbulls (21-25)

This list clashes wildly, chaotically, and yet it is the speaker’s reality. The image is pulled in all different directions: we have modernity and machine (diesel fuel, radiators) colliding with nature (dandelions, rhododendrons), as well as life (dandelions, pitbulls, perhaps organ meat) and death (dead blooms, organ meat). Beyond the images conflicting, the way that each word is situated adds to the sense that these forces are at odds with one another--nature seems like it will dominate for a moment with line 24’s overgrown plants, but the plant’s dead blooms of line 25 fall back on this; there is no winner, only a struggle. “Organ meat” is of particular interest for the potential dual meaning. It may refer to the literal body parts of the person murdered, but it may also be the living bodies of the neighbors that surround the speaker, described abstractly to represent his disconnect from them. In the case of the latter, the reduction of man to organ meat reads as out of place as anything else in the list: man, too, does not seem to belong in this tumultuous environment. Where, then, does man belong?

Halfway through the collection, a piece titled “The Manhood of Poetry” offers some answers as to where man belongs and what men do. Interestingly, this poem seems to pigeonhole what it means to be a real man. The speaker builds up an idea of manhood, populating it with whiskey, fishing poles, knives and rifles, fighting and killing, and a connection to the wilderness over the course of several couplets, only to break from expectation in the sixth stanza, both in content and form:

… To kill them is a preservation. Fuck,

I’m a liar; my name is not Sid and I’ve never even held

a rifle in my hands. I’d like to blame my lack of mettle

on my generation or class and use the springs of my youth

as an excuse… (11-15)

This longer stanza disrupts the poem successfully, seeming to break into the speaker’s real thoughts and prod at his imposter syndrome and, again, his feeling of alienation from spaces he wishes to belong. The imposter syndrome comes about not only in the speaker calling himself a liar, but all throughout the poem when taking a logical step back: he does not feel like a true man by holding “a degree” rather than “a fishing pole or a knife,” nor as a poet rather than “in the wilderness” (3-6). Realistically, a man with a degree is still respected for being educated. Male poets, too, have been favored and more widely published throughout history than female poets. What the speaker details as borderline shameful in comparison to knives and rifles does not come across as unmanly or cowardly, highlighting the speaker’s warped and low sense of self. There is a longing and jealousy that the speaker feels toward his perception of manhood and other men:

It’s all specialization these days. The mechanic never recites

Levine’s What Work Is and I don’t gut my dinner, you can see

my ribcage and my neighbor’s fat belly hang over his cock. (22-24)

Here the speaker further pushes the divide between himself and “real men,” creating a polarity between the two with the claim that the mechanic “never” does as the speaker does and vice versa. Jealousy punctures the final line of the poem through the stark difference between the speaker’s ribcage and his neighbor’s fat belly. The picture of a starving artist comes to mind with the speaker drawing attention to his ribcage, perhaps offering insight to where this imposter syndrome and jealousy stem from as the speaker struggles to succeed as a poet.

Progressing through the collection, one poem that truly embodies the turn toward hopefulness is Miller’s shortest poem, titled “Gizzard,” with only three lines. This piece gives the impression of settling into and learning to work with the unpleasant environment that the speaker finds himself in:

Chicken wire is woven into the weeds

around me.

It’s easy to step over. (1-3)

Though brief, these two simple stanzas put in a lot of work. The clash between organic and inorganic material is present in the weeds and chicken wire, again creating a tension within the environment. The second line, “around me,” feels reminiscent of the collection’s opening poem, with this matter running parallel to the list within “Exile on Foster” that surrounds that reader. While that piece spirals into the speaker’s loneliness after observing his surroundings, this piece offers resolution. Interestingly, there is no one else present in the poem, so we know that the issue of community is not what is being resolved. Instead, the speaker is reaching a place of understanding with his environment, despite its roughness and conflict. The environment has not been altered, the tension still remains, yet the speaker can navigate it with ease, showing individual growth. We are not given a fairytale resolution to all of the speaker's problems, but we see things improving over time, and slow progress in a rough place is much more believable than the fairytale option. It is fitting and deserved for a speaker who is as rough around the edges as the environment he navigates.

With this overview of Miller’s work in mind, there are two more points of interest that complicate the collection: the variety of references to The Silver Jews and what they mean to the work, and the aspects of the collection that fail to serve it well. Beginning with The Silver Jews, the most glaring reference is the collection’s namesake, which is one of their songs. The Silver Jews come up again in the later half of the collection, with Miller utilizing lyrics from several different songs as titles for his pieces and/or incorporating the lines into the body of the poems. There are many questions to ask of these allusions, but perhaps two of the most important are: how do these references enhance the poems, and is any meaning lost to a reader unfamiliar with The Silver Jews and their music? It is difficult to answer the former as someone falling into the category of the unfamiliar reader, but it seems that the songs serve as inspiration for the poems in the way that the references are situated primarily in titles and opening stanzas, like Miller is utilizing them as a jump off point. The songs do seem to align in theme with the poems they show up in; for example, “Like Plug-In Reindeer” is about love and the song that the lyrics come from is also a love song. In this way, the function of the references may be to bolster the themes. Turning to the second question of whether reader’s lose meaning, it seems that Miller successfully gets his ideas across either way, with the references merely shadowing the themes. Also, the references all come in the second half of the poem, so readers are eased into the collection’s themes wholly before confronting the allusions. As a result, the references do not appear to interfere with reader comprehension.

When it comes to elements of the poems that do not serve the collection well, there is only one issue of sensitivity that stands out, and it is a complicated one. One of the collection’s successes, as detailed earlier, is the way that issues remain partially unresolved, only slow growth takes place. However, an area that shows no growth or resolution is the speaker’s recurring misogynistic perspective, which somewhat fits with the collection’s discomfort and violence, but perhaps unsuccessfully as it alienates female readers. This issue is present from the beginning, in “Exile on Foster”:

And no matter who I am now

and no matter what I have done

to have a block of whores closer to me

than a good cup of black coffee. (77-80)

There is an implication here that the speaker has done something wrong in order to deserve “a block of whores” closer to him than coffee, represented by both line 78 and the choice of adjectives in line 80--a good cup of coffee. Coffee is good--a block of whores is not. As a female reader, this pulls me from the poem and makes me wonder how the “whores,” whether this refers to sex workers or women that the speaker dislikes, have any impact on his life. If this was a strange, one-off occurrence, it would likely not be an issue, but the negativity toward women, and sex workers in particular, continues throughout the collection. “Wild and Birds” offers another of these uncomfortable encounters:

and the woman five blocks away whose

knee-high boots almost cover her fishnets,

to fortify their diets.

The squirrel with his walnuts.

The prostitute and her goulash. (25-29)

With the description of the woman’s clothing coming before the speaker’s labeling of her as a prostitute, it comes across as if the outfit is the reasoning behind this label. Perhaps most uncomfortable though is the fact that the woman is five blocks away yet still on the speaker’s radar. While whores and prostitutes may make the speaker uncomfortable, female readers must also face a different discomfort in the fact that their bodies and areas of work can't exist in peace. Even five blocks away is not far enough to be put out of the mind of this man who feels punished to live a block closer to whores. Is it not women's punishment to feel this looming threat? The speaker seeks community, but judges and alienates those around him as well in these instances. It is frustrating that the speaker does not show growth in this area--that Miller did not place some resolution or subvert this thread of violence near the end of his collection--when it leaves a different threat of alienation with its female readers than it does with the speaker’s woes of alienation.

Overall, the collection offers a thoughtful discussion on belonging with cohesive themes and imagery throughout. Miller’s food and bird motifs are impressively consistent, weaving threads of hunger that run along with the need to belong, and always keeping nature on the outskirts of the reader’s mind as we trek through the organ meat and rusted radiators that also plague the environment. Miller’s uncomplicated word choice and follow-through sentence structure lend an ease to the reading, while the clashing imagery manages to surprise the reader and keep interest. While there are some instances of discomfort that seem to narrow the collection’s audience, it delivers on its major themes.