Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

I sometimes wonder if what critics condemn in the writers they review are really the motes and beams which blind them in their own work.

When reviewer Peter Craft “damns with faint praise” the first published collection of Josephine Miles (1911–1985) by saying:  “. . . [the] usual never-never of the American poetess is almost absent. Miss Miles is aware of the world in which she lives and this is to her credit.” But when he calls this her poem’s “limitations,” one wonders how he can so deftly determine the limitations of a writer under age 30 with only a single book to her credit. Since the year was 1939, how grievous he would consider this fault if the poet’s name were Joseph must remain a matter for conjecture, but when a man uses the phrase “usual never-never of the American poetess,” it surely raises the question.

I think Gwendolyn Brooks came much closer in her review of Miles’ Collected Poems, 1930-1983: “This is not poetry to be used for lullaby purposes. Eye and ear must stand awake, or much of the beauty and intellectual significance will remain on the page.”

Josephine Miles went on to become an award-winning poet who produced over a dozen books of poetry. She was also a distinguished professor, being the first woman tenured in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley (1947); a busy editor of anthologies and critical texts; and an author of books on poetic style and language.

What is truly astonishing about all her accomplishments is described by her friend and fellow poet Thom Gunn: “The unavoidable first fact about Josephine Miles was physical. As a young child she contracted a form of degenerative arthritis so severe that it left her limbs deformed and crippled. As a result, she could not be left alone in a house, she could not handle a mug…she could not use a typewriter; and she could neither walk nor operate a wheelchair.”
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This poem is dated September, 1934. It speaks to me because my earliest memories are of our first family home, isolated at the end of a dirt road in the middle of the Arizona desert. Miles has captured that world of sun-glare and cactus perfectly.

Desert

When with the skin you do acknowledge drought,
The dry in the voice, the lightness of feet, the fine
Flake of the heat at every level line;

When with the hand you learn to touch without
Surprise the spine for the leaf, the prickled petal,
The stone scorched in the shine, and the wood brittle;

Then where the pipe drips and the fronds sprout
And the foot-square forest of clover blooms in sand,
You will lean and watch, but never touch with your hand.

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