The Beat Century — post 35 of 100. Josephine Miles, Collected Poems (1998).
Josephine Miles taught Spicer and Blaser, helped Howl reach print, pioneered computational literary study, and wrote fifty years of spare and exact poems that almost nobody reads.
The University of Illinois Press published Josephine Miles’s Collected Poems, 1930–1983 in 1983. It won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer. Miles died two years later, in Berkeley, of pneumonia. She was seventy-three, had published more than a dozen collections of poems and roughly as many volumes of criticism, and had held the University of California’s rarely granted title of University Professor.
Almost none of this is what she is remembered for, when she is remembered at all. Miles occupies an odd position in the literature of postwar San Francisco: everywhere in the story and absent from the telling. She was the person the poets went to see, the reader whose judgement they wanted, and the professional who could make a manuscript move through channels they had no access to. That role is the sort literary history records as background.
The First Woman In
Miles (1911–1985) was born in Chicago and moved to Southern California at five because of progressive arthritis. She took her degree at UCLA and her doctorate at Berkeley, completing it in 1938. In 1947 she became the first woman granted tenure in Berkeley’s English Department — eighty years after the department’s founding. She remained the only tenured woman in it for another fifteen years.
The arthritis was severe and lifelong. Thom Gunn, a colleague, described its scope plainly: she could not be left alone in a house, could not handle a mug, could not use a typewriter, and could neither walk nor operate a wheelchair. She has been claimed since as a pioneer of what is now called disability poetics, though she resisted being defined by the condition. The scholar Susan Schweik has noted that her poems address barriers and disablement obliquely rather than as subject matter — and made the uncomfortable observation that her disability may have rendered her less threatening to male colleagues, which complicates any simple reading of her breakthrough.
The Teacher of the Movement
Her students are the argument. Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser both passed through her classrooms, as did William Stafford, A. R. Ammons, Diane Wakoski, Diana O’Hehir and, later, Arthur Sze. Her students went on to publish some fifty volumes of poetry; two of them took the National Book Award. She was fascinated by Beat poetry and served as both host and critic to its practitioners from her chair at Berkeley.
The most consequential single act came with Howl. Miles recommended Ginsberg’s poem to Richard Eberhart, whose subsequent article in the New York Times did more than any review to establish the poem’s national reputation before the obscenity trial. The channel by which the San Francisco Renaissance reached the East Coast literary establishment ran through a disabled woman professor’s desk, and the histories of the period rarely mention it.
Accounts of her teaching are consistent on one point — the quality of her attention. She gave rare personal notice to every student and genuinely followed their progress. A former student’s description is the best line anyone has written about her: “She never loses track of the person she’s talking to, and she listens with absolute attention.” She would set students to writing verses in the metrical rhythms of their own names.
The Scholar Who Counted Words
Miles’s criticism was quantitative decades before anyone called it that. Books like Wordsworth and the Vocabulary of Emotion and Eras and Modes in English Poetry studied the actual conventions of grammar and vocabulary across periods rather than the sensibilities of individual geniuses — a materialist approach to style, treating poetic language as a countable historical fact. It is an approach that treats a poem as evidence of a shared linguistic era rather than as the emanation of a solitary imagination, and it made her an awkward colleague in a department built on the opposite premise.
In 1957 she directed the completion of a concordance to Dryden’s poetry built with punched cards and computers, described as possibly the first literary concordance produced by machine methods and predating better-known projects. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964. The field now called digital humanities has a founder it seldom cites, and she is the same person who told Eberhart to read Howl.
The Poems
The Collected Poems spans fifty-three years, from Lines at Intersection in 1939 forward. The work is short-lined, dry, syntactically exact, and almost entirely without the confessional pressure that dominated American poetry in her later decades. Miles wrote about people in rooms, in traffic, in conversation, with an ear trained by counting how English actually behaves. The scholarship and the poems are one project: a writer who had measured the vocabulary of emotion across three centuries was never going to be careless with her own.
The book’s neglect is partly structural. She belonged to no movement — too formally attentive for the Beats she mentored, too plain for the New Critics, resident in Berkeley rather than New York, a critic among poets and a poet among critics. That she was awarded a major prize and a Pulitzer nomination in 1983 and remains largely unread is a reasonable indictment of how literary reputation is actually distributed.
The recovery, when it comes, will probably arrive through the scholarship rather than the verse. Computational literary study has grown into a field with journals and departments, and it has begun looking for ancestors. Miles is the obvious one, and the poems are sitting in the same collected volume, waiting to be picked up by readers who came for the punched cards.
She never loses track of the person she’s talking to, and she listens with absolute attention.
A former student on Josephine Miles, quoted by the UC Berkeley English department
Where to go next
Read her beside Jack Spicer’s collected poems — one of her students, and the clearest evidence of what her classroom transmitted.
Previous: Herbert Huncke, The Herbert Huncke Reader. Next: Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.
Sources
- Josephine Miles — Wikipedia
- About Josephine Miles — Academy of American Poets
- Josephine Miles: Poet and First Tenured Professor in English — UC Berkeley English
- Josephine Miles — EBSCO Research Starters
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
