It was my considerable pleasure to have an extended chat with E. Ethelbert Miller last week on his weekly WPFW show “On the Margin.”
A bit more about Ethelbert, here.
And here’s a small, but beautiful taste of his poetic skills. This one, simply and devastatingly entitled “The Things in Black Men’s Closets” does what the best writing can do: it packs the types of punches that you don’t know hit you until your brain swells with insight, never to be the same. It also condenses volumes of information and emotion into the most succinct space, where an extra line would suffocate and one less word could send the whole structure crumbling into the dark spaces from whence it came. Suffice it to say, I recommend the uninitiated to check out his work, and there’s no better place than this collection (which happens to have been edited by my friend, an outstanding poet in her own right, Kirsten Porter).
Oh, and he also provided me time to talk about the Virginia Center for Literary Arts. I hope you’ll listen (and FYI, the sixty minute program is split in two; the first half focuses on my writing, the second is all about VCLA), and I’d love to hear from you if this conversation prompts comments or suggestions, etc.
(If you have any trouble with the audio, below, you can go directly to the WPFW site and under “Archived Shows” page, our conversation is from 2/7.)
