Professor
English
Rosati Hall Room 204
Staten Island campus
(718) 390-4410
millers@stjohns.edu
Stephen Paul Miller, Professor of English, joined the faculty in
1991. He has also taught in the English departments of Columbia
University, NYU, and Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland as a
senior Fulbright Scholar. Tel Aviv University has nominated
him for a second senior Fulbright fellowship to teach in Tel Aviv
University’s English Department, and the Council for the
International Exchange of Scholars in Washington has approved this
nomination.
Dr. Miller has made substantial contributions in various facets of
cultural and literary studies and poetry. “Stephen Paul Miller is
an established American critic,” says Timothy Gray In Contemporary
Literature. Critics note synergy between his criticism and poetry.
“Miller’s work,” comments David Shapiro “is an amazing synthesis of
experimental and narrative modes. An astonishing creative and
critical force, he’s the most radical poet-critic I know.”
Miller’s first critical book, The Seventies Now: Culture as
Surveillance, published by Duke University Press in 1999,
begins an academic reassessment of the seventies. Miller provides
critical apparatus capable of an in-depth account of the decade.
“Miller shows why and how we need to think comprehensively about
the seventies—now,” W. J. T. Mitchell says. “Interdisciplinary wit
and a bold intelligence bring together poetry, politics, and a
popular culture in a broad survey that is provocative, engaging,
and timely for our posthistorical age.” Miller relates a plethora
of phenomena diverse as John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex
Mirror,” the Watergate affair, Star Wars, and Phil Glass’s music.
“Most remarkable of all,” according to Ian Smith in Scope,
“is Miller's analysis of the famous missing eighteen minutes of
tape.” “Miller closes a mysterious missing gap in American cultural
history,” says Jeremiah Creedon in Utne Reader. Andrew
Ross in American Literature observes, “Miller’s lesson is
about an interpretive methodology teaching us to listen to things
we had not heard before.”
Miller’s influence crosses many interdisciplinary boundaries.
Observing how useful Miller’s innovative literary methodologies are
for noting small historical shifts in what Miller terms
“micro-periods” and “rippling epistemes,” Kenneth Gloag in
Rethinking History calls Seventies Now, “A remarkable
cultural history of the 1970s.” Many see new possibilities for
historical study in Miller’s work. David Bowman reports in the
San Francisco Chronicle that “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 and erudite hoot.” Howard Brick in Journal of American
History points out, “Miller shows how a few artifacts, at a
unique moment, mark a break in conventional means of apprehending
reality.” “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,’” observes Jerome Klinkowitz of American Literary
Scholarship. Timothy Gray in Postmodern Culture
maintains "One would be hard pressed to find a more detailed or
nuanced appraisal of the uneasiness and paranoia that reigned
during the 'undecade.'” “Miller draws suggestive and lively
comparisons between disparate cultural documents. It is a
fascinating and scholarly study which sheds much new light on a
complex decade," maintains David Seed in European Journal of
American Culture.
John Brenkman points out, “Miller’s commentary on the role of
spies, lies, and audiotape in the Watergate era brilliantly
resonates his whole analysis of seventies culture, from poetry and
film to the new technologies of surveillance and new modes of
recording history.” “Miller posits the ‘70s as the era when
Americans got used to perceiving multiple simultaneous
narratives—seen, unseen, implied, and excerpted," notes Julia Scher
in Bookforum. “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,” says Daniel Morris in
Modern Fiction Studies.
Miller’s next critical project has an even wider breadth of
interest than his first. He is considering post-World War II
culture in terms of the “liquid totems” of Holocaust, computer, and
suburbanization. Several versions of Miller’s evolving argument
have already appeared in print in essays and, interestingly, in
poems. “Stephen Paul Miller has written a great deal of poetry that
is simultaneously cultural criticism or even scholarship,” notes
Thomas A. Fink in A Different Sense of Power: Problems of
Community in Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry (Farleigh
Dickinson University Press). Miller, says Fink, ‘braids together
treatments of various seemingly disparate cultural phenomena while
[expositorilly] developing” expository relationships.
Miller’s poetry culminates in a new kind of poetry-criticism that
uses engines of critical thought to drive poetic insight. After the
publication of first poetry book, Art Is Boring for the Same
Reason We Stayed in Vietnam (Domestic Press, 1992), M.L.
Rosenthal said, “Stephen Paul Miller is an endearingly casual and
lyrically resonant philosophical post- and pre-everything moment
poet.” Katherine Arnoldi, in The St. Mark’s Poetry Project
Newsletter says of Miller’s book length poem that “we follow
Stephen Paul Miller’s poem, skipping down the page...not exactly
surprised to find a candy house, Derrida, General Schwarzkopf,
Blake, Magic Johnson, the Lower East Side....” Thomas A. Fink takes
the title of his critical study, A Different Sense of
Power, from a phrase in Miller’s first book, and, according to
Fink, Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in
Vietnam “seems the ultimate enactment of self-critical reader
response” that “indefatigably and brilliantly poses the immense
question of how a thoroughgoing openness to differences can be
situated in concrete intellectual practice.”
Miller is also the author of The Bee Flies in May (Marsh
Hawk Press, 2002). About The Bee Flies in May, Andrew Ross
says, “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.” In Sidereality, Madeline Tiger says, “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.’ This collection shows how Miller has kept many worlds
active.” Eileen Myles calls The Bee Flies in May
“entertaining because it just happens” and “New York as poetry
is....Stephen writes his poems on an invisible surface that
breathes and grows. It’s like watching good poetry happen.”
Concerning Skinny Eighth Avenue (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005),
Miller’s third book of poetry, Joyelle McSweeney, in Constant
Critic, says, “Skinny Eighth Avenue is a lively, brainy,
probing and variform collaboration between the latter-day New York
School poet/critic Stephen Paul Miller and his artist son, Noah
Mavael Miller, who was in third grade at the time of the book’s
release about a year ago. Miller’s erudite, humane, and yes, talky
poems are punctuated by young Noah with exuberant drawings of
mastodons, turtles, and other fauna, often climbing into and out of
computer-generated holes....Skinny Eighth Avenue is as
packed, fleet, worldly, busy and exhilarating as any New York
thoroughfare, neither cute nor particularly skinny, a hurtling and
compelling book.” In the Brooklyn Rail, Carol Wierzbicki
calls Miller’s means of disseminating content “uniquely affecting.
Miller has redefined the confessional poem.” In the Boston
Review, Barbara Fischer observes, “there’s no place for
compression or fragmentation in Stephen Paul Miller’s third book of
poems, which embraces a mode of ‘ongoing discourse’ in order to
narrate, argue, and inquire at length and in complete sentences.
Miller’s expansive lines migrate across the page from margin to
margin, an undulating motion that propels a breezy prosaic tone.
This conversational fluidity and unstrained syntax enables him to
address politics, current events, theoretical concerns, and
personal experience with both critical acumen and wry
self-mockery.”
Skinny Eighth Avenue “addresses ongoing effects of the Holocaust,
secular Judaism, children and academia,” according to 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,” says William Allegrezza in Galatea
Resurrects: A Poetry Review. Jordan Davis, in the Paterson
Review, remarks, “Miller can be as funny -- funny -- as Lenny
Bruce....I'm ready to reread such Stephen Paul Miller classics as
"I Was on a Golf Course the Day John Cage Died of a Stroke"
(in Best American Poems 1994), and Art Is Boring for the
Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam.”
“Stephen Paul Miller is either the Last Poet of the New York
School or the First Poet of the New New York School. Probably both.
These poems twist on a diamond, creating the shape of art and some
sort of wisdom on the inside. Like an ice cream
cone....Something postmodern, post-postmodern, post-everything.
Finding something to live for in the pain is the joy of this
poetry,” says Bob Holman. “Skinny Eighth Avenue is
poetry of the future. But it’s grounded in a wildly flexible
strength of language,” Maria Mazziotti Gillan comments. Sam Truitt,
in American Book Review, envisions, “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.”
Dr. Miller, with Terence Diggory, co-edited Scene of My
Selves: New Work on the New York School Poets, (National
Poetry Foundation, 2000). He is currently editing Radical
Poetic Practice/Secular Jewish Culture. Talisman House Press
is publishing a fourth book of his poetry, Being with a
Bullet, in 2008. Miller earned a B.A. in English and
M.A. in American Studies from CCNY in 1972 and 1983 and a Ph. D. in
American Studies from NYU in 1990. Dr. Miller was a NEH Summer
Seminar for College Professors participant in John Brenkman’s
“Emergent American Literature” seminar at CUNY in 1995. In 1995,
he earned a Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library Research and
Travel Grant, and, in 2002, a Columbia University Seminar Office
Grant. He co-chaired the Columbia University American Studies
Seminar from 1999 to 2002. He served as a tenure evaluator for
CUNY, and he was a Ph.D. dissertation reader for the
Comparative Literature Department, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He has been a manuscript
reviewer for University of Toronto Press, University of Southern
Illinois Press, Purdue University Press, University of
Mississippi Press, Transformations, and PMLA
(Publication of the Modern Language Association). He is now a
member of the Transformations Editorial Board, a Trustee of the New
Jersey College English Teachers Association. He currently is a St.
John’s University Faculty Association Executive Board member, St.
John’s University Center for Teaching and Writing fellow, and
editor of Cultural and Poetic Inquiry.