Stephen Paul Miller

Associate Professor of English
St. John's College of Arts and Sciences
Staten Island Campus, Rosati Hall
(718) 390-4410
millers@stjohns.edu

Office Hours, Spring 2006
Tuesday: 12:10 - 1:30 P.M.
Thursday: 8:00 - 8:20 A.M., 12:10 - 1:30 P.M.

Stephen Paul Miller is an Associate Professor of English at St. John's University in New York City. He is the author of The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Duke University Press, 1999). This book "micro-periodizes" the seventies by utilizing the discourses of politics, poetry, and painting around the phenomena of Watergate, John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," and Jasper John's mid-seventies crosshatch paintings so as to note the "rippling epistemes" through which the upheavals of the sixties yield to the Reagan eighties by way of the Watergate era.
 
Miller is also the author of three books of poems, The Bee Flies in May (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002), Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam (Domestic Press, 1992), That Man Who Ground Moths into Film (New Observations, 1982). His latest poetry book, The Bee Flies in May, contains a long poem entitled "Row," relates the Holocaust, suburbia, and computerization. The poem draws in surprising ways on the work of Alan Turing, Hannah Arendt, and Raymond Williams. Miller is currently formulating an academic project based on the poem.

Reviews

M.L. Rosenthal called Stephen Paul Miller an “endearingly casual lyrically resonant philosophical post- and pre-everything moment poet.” He’s the author of The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Duke University Press), with Terence Diggory, co-editor of Scene of My Selves: New Work on the New York School Poets, (National Poetry Foundation) and three poetry books: Skinny Eighth Avenue and The Bee Flies in May (Marsh Hawk Press) and Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam (Domestic Press). Another poetry book, Being with a Bullet (Jensen/Daniels), Radical Poetic Practice/Secular Jewish Culture (University of Alabama Press), Liquid Totem: Holocaust, Computer, Suburb are forthcoming. He is a Professor of English at St. John's University. He has also taught at Columbia University, and he was a senior Fulbright scholar in Krakow, Poland. 

On Skinny Eighth Avenue: “Our consciousness needs a new conscience: human consciousness needs a new keel. Some of its lines of design may be found on Skinny Eighth Avenue.”—Sam Truitt, American Book Review. “Stephen Paul Miller is the First Poet of the New New York School. Finding something to live for in the pain is the joy of this poetry.”—Bob Holman   “The poetry of the future.”—Maria Mazziotti Gillan   “He writes his poems on an invisible surface that breathes and grows. It’s like watching good poetry happen.”—Eileen Myles   “Addresses ongoing effects of the Holocaust, secular Judaism, children and academia.”—Publisher’s Weekly. Miller reacts to his time and raises many questions we often do not want to confront about religion, politics, and art. He does all of this within open forms that explore the page. He shows us connections that might usually be at play below our visual or perceptual range.—William Allegrezza, Galatea Resurrects: A Poetry Review.

On The Bee Flies in May: “Chinua Achebe refers to the Igbo earth goddess, Ani, ‘who cradles creativity as a child on her left knee and holds up the sword of morality in her right hand.’ Stephen Paul Miller, in his stunning collection shows that he has heard this mandate. Miller retrieves history from unspeakable despair. There's a new air in the fast-talking quality of these poems, which go beyond "New York School" casualness. This collection shows how Miller has kept many worlds active.”—Madeline Tiger, Sidereality. Miller’s mind is exactly the kind of soft, self-perpetuating machine that you want to access when your own is running out of juice.—Andrew Ross. “Miller’s work is an amazing synthesis of experimental and narrative modes. An astonishing creative and critical force, He’s the most radical poet-critic I know.”--David Shapiro.  

On Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets: “Stephen Paul Miller is an established American critic.”— Timothy Gray, Contemporary Fiction.

On The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance: "Miller makes cultural comparisons that are equal parts genius and madness.  Maybe a perspective on the 1970s will help our current condition make sense, maybe not. Either way, Stephen Paul Miller's book is a valuable anderudite hoot."—David Bowman, San Francisco Chronicle.  “Miller closes a mysterious missing gap in American cultural history.”—Jeremiah Creedon, Utne Reader. “Miller’s lesson is about an interpretive methodology teaching us to listen to things we had not heard before.”—Andrew Ross, American Literature. “A remarkable cultural history of the 1970s.”—Kenneth Gloag, Rethinking History. “Miller posits the '70s as the era when Americans got used to perceiving multiple simultaneous narratives—seen, unseen, implied, and excerpted."--Julia Scher, Bookforum. “Miller draws suggestive and lively comparisons between disparate cultural documents. A fascinating and scholarly study which sheds much new light on a complex decade."—David Seed, European Journal of American Culture. "Looking beyond surface tendencies, Miller's thesis is that during the 1970s 'institutionalized external surveillance' familiar from the cold war era of the immediately previous decades became a more internalized phenomenon. From the women's movement to the environment, Americans became accustomed to 'surveying themselves.' "—Jerome Klinkowitz, American Literary Scholarship. "One would be hard pressed to find a more detailed or nuanced appraisal of the uneasiness and paranoia that reigned during the 'undecade.'"—Timothy Gray, Postmodern Culture. "Miller shows how a few artifacts, at a unique moment, mark a break in conventional means of apprehending reality."--Howard Brick, Journal of American History. “If Whitman had taken a Ph.D., this might resemble its outcome. Miller is not Whitman, but he is a Wit-man. Both are poets who have written large period pieces that signify their awareness of America in crucial times.”—Daniel Morris, Modern Fiction Studies.