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Kei Miller was born Kingston, Jamaica in 1978. He read English at the University of the West Indies and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. His first book of poetry, Kingdom of Empty Bellies, was published in 2006 by Heaventree Press. It was shortly followed by a collection of short stories, The Fear of Stones, which explores the issue of Jamaican homophobia and was shortlisted in 2007 for a Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in the category of Best First Book. His second collection of poetry, There is an Anger That Moves, was published in 2007 by Carcanet Press and he has a novel forthcoming from Phoenix,The Same Earth. Kei Miller divides his time between Jamaica and the United Kingdom, where he teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.

You’ve published poetry, short stories, and a novel: what are the differences in the writing process for you?

I think, as a writer, what I’m always trying to find is the perfect shape for the thing I want to say. I don’t always know what that shape is, and sometimes it’s frustrating, having a strong sense of a thing – a nebulous but a strong thing – and not finding a good shape for it, its own shape really. So far I’ve written poems, stories, novels and increasingly I’ve been writing essays, because these are the shapes I’ve found so far to fit the things I’ve been trying to say, the stories I’ve wanted to tell. It’s all the same process to me. A poem obviously works quite differently from a story or from an essay, but what they are to me are shapes to use and bend. Some things are consistent I hope, like I hope the work is lyrical even if it’s prose; in an essay I think I often try to make my point through cadences.And I think all my work is narrative to an extent, even the poetry, at its heart I’m always telling a story.

Do you look for stories in others’ poetry?

I’m not sure that I do actually. I look for moments – I know that sounds kind of imprecise, but I think we all know when we come to it in a poem – perhaps it is the moment of lift-off, the moment the poem leaps. And these moments always come through language. I like telling stories because that’s the way I’ve learned to access these moments; it’s as if I’m building myself a platform from which to leap, from which to undo and redo language in a way that might cause a physical reaction in the reader. Story is how I’ve taught myself to do it, but it’s not the only way it’s done. I don’t look for others to do what I do.

The poems in There is an Anger that Moves seem to me to have a strong sense of place – though not all the same place. Is a sense of place important to you?

I could answer that in so many ways. I’ve just moved flats in Glasgow and I’m in that giddy state of liking the new flat and trying to create a space that belongs to me, and in which I can live and write and have guests. And that really is important to me, to have a place like that. It’s important to me that I am from the Caribbean, and that is a geographic place that you can point to on a map. But things get slippery after that. Because the Caribbean for me is also a landscape of sound, and if it makes sense, the Caribbean exists far beyond the Caribbean. I guess I’m talking about diasporas and how we imagine them. And though I’m often writing about that place where I am from, I’ve always recognized that my readers are from other places and I’ve always wanted to welcome them in, to never exclude them.

That sense of the Caribbean existing beyond the Caribbean is apparent, in your poems, to me as a reader. Does the writing process change for you in different places or are you always writing from the Caribbean in a way?

So far I’m always writing from the Caribbean. But what changes is an awareness that the work is being read beyond the Caribbean. As I’ve said, it’s important to me not to exclude readers. So I try to suggest a Caribbean language and rhythm in a way that won’t have readers too puzzled. I think perhaps the worst thing is to have a reader completely caught up in a world that you’ve created and then suddenly lose them because you’ve struck a note that sounds very off to their ear. This is very tricky business, because as a writer you must also train the reader’s ear in sounds that they might not be familiar with – but I try to be gentle in this.

I’d like to ask you about ‘The Broken’ sections in There is an Anger that Moves and your admitted discomfort with writing in first person. You have said that it was the hardest thing you ever had to write and the poems in those sections suggest that something is irrevocably changed by their writing:

“I break the ceiling. I break the bone and the jaw
and the habit of hiding. I break the stone. I break the curse.
They are broken. I am written.”

For many contemporary poets the first person is the default position: can you say what made writing the ‘I’ so difficult – and was it the writing or the publishing of it that did the breaking?

I guess it goes back to this thing about telling stories – inventing a tale, spinning it, and that to me is most comfortably done as third-person narrative. I know the great majority of poets start out writing from the self, but then poetry for me has never been therapeutic in that way, I’ve never had to write to unburden myself of something. And I’m glad that I started writing poetry like that, because it doesn’t make me romantic or precious or insistent on ‘personal truth’ or the way something ‘really happened’. I really believe most poets have to learn to write away from themselves before they return to that self. But saying this can’t be truly shocking to any writer or indeed anyone with an ounce of introspection. For even in day to day conversation, each time we talk about ourselves, that ‘I’ is always an invention that is serving a narrative. So even in ‘The Broken’ – though the ‘I’ there is perhaps extremely close to who I am, even then I understood that at the poem’s heart the ‘I’ was being invented and had to serve the poem, and that there was a bigger truth than an autobiographical truth that I wanted the poem to reach for.

So ‘The Broken’ was hard to write, because it was first person and it was confessional and that is exactly the kind of poem I don’t usually like - that I am suspicious of, that I usually find a bit self-indulgent.And it was hard also, because it really was therapeutic – and as detached as I wanted to be, there were times when I was writing and crying at the same time.

“Romantic or precious or insistent on ‘personal truth’ or the way something ‘really happened’”- are these things that turn you off others’ poetry? Do you have ‘pet hates’ in poetry?

‘But this is what really happened’ certainly is a pet peeve of mine, but especially in a workshop when the student gives it as a defense for why such and such a line is actually working. Who ever cares what “really happened”? How can we on the outside ever know that? All we have is the poem, or the story, and everything that happens in the work only happens in the work. No where else. It has to be justified by the world of the story or the poem – not by anything external. So it turns me off in a big way, because it’s a lazy sort of a defense – it prevents the writer from looking at the work as a work. And by extension, perhaps I do have a general annoyance with poems that are intensely interior, poems that are almost contemptuous of their audiences and are less than forthcoming with their meanings. I do believe in poems being difficult – but I believe they need to earn that difficulty.Young poets often think that to be vague is to be poetic, but vagueness is absolutely unpoetic.

Can you give three things that you’d like beginning poets to understand or learn?

Now I’m not sure I can pin down three things young poets should understand – and certainly I can’t say it in any better way than such things have been said again and again: that we must read far more than we write; that poetry is never about what we say, it is about how we say it; that poetry is about making people feel things they’ve never felt before, because before our poems they never had the language to feel these feelings. And that is a huge kind of responsibility, to give people new access to their own selves. But these are big things to say, and some poets might understand the rhetoric, but still never be able to do it. Perhaps such people aren’t really poets. That is a horribly damning thing to say, I know. Damning because it is so true.

But it is a scary thing when you realize that you really can do poetry, when you realize what you are capable of doing to people through language. So perhaps the thing I’d want to say to young poets who realize they can do it, that they can affect people, is simply one thing – don’t be afraid of yourself.

Do you think you can see, in their poems, if poets are afraid of themselves? What effect does that fear have on the poem?

No no... I don’t think you can see the kind of fear I’m talking about in a poet’s work. It would be interesting if one could. What you can see is the potential and sometimes the ambition, and with that often comes all kinds of frustrating emotions – to know that you’re capable of doing something, that you’re reaching for something that you can’t touch or achieve just yet. I’m not sure how to put this into words – but it must be like this for most practising poets, that there’s often this big divide between what we know a poem can do, what we want to do to poetry, and what we are capable of doing in the present. It’s a mix of frustration, and anticipation, and egotism and lots of things. When I say,‘don’t be afraid of yourself’, I simply mean to relish those mixed up feelings that come with writing poems, because I suspect when those feelings go, so will the poetry.

You introduce the reader to a number of different characters in There is an Anger that Moves and I am struck by the compassion and humanity with which you draw them – even when it is a character that could be treated unsympathetically such as in ‘An Allowance for Ula-May’:

“Ula-May, keeper, interpreter and dispenser
of rules, read the book of Leviticus once a month.
She believed only in laws that forbade,
none that allowed, so she did-not
more than she ever did.”

How important do you think it is that poets have a genuine and positive interest in people?

You know, I’m cautious about the framing of that question. How important is it for other poets? Should it be important for other poets? I don’t know yet. I don’t want to lay down a law that is suspect and biased. But these things are important to me. It’s interesting the poem you point out, because I had tried to write that poem for years, and it never worked. It never worked because I had never dared to love Ula-May, to understand her. I was filled with what I thought was the right emotion – a kind of silly post-colonial resentment. But this of course was a received emotion and not incredibly genuine. Emotionally, the poem was clichéd. By daring to love Ula-May, I think I finally complicated it enough, by showing at once how horrible she was, but layering that horror – not making it so easy to condemn her.

Of course I want to say that love is important, but at times I am afraid to say it in this country that seems suspicious of any grand statement, especially those said without irony. As if we are naive to say such a thing. But love is important. Before I came to England, I had been a copywriter in Jamaica, and I knew I had to leave that job because it was damaging my writing. It was teaching me to be contemptuous of my audience – of people. It was teaching me to write down to them.There is so much that exists not only in the relationship between author and character, but also author and reader – and I think one of those things, in a good healthy relationship, must be love.