47:1 Spring 2001

RALPH J. MILLS, JR.

Two Poems

In the early 1960s, CR published several essays by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. on poets like Stanley Kunitz, Rene Char, Henri Michaux, Edith Sitwell, and James Wright; since the mid-1990s, CR has published several of his poems as well. Here are two from the Spring 2001 issue.

In a review-essay published in Winter 2005, former poetry editor Devin Johnston wrote the following:

To understand the self, Mills's poetry suggests, we might imagine the world without us. In the face of extremity and noise, he turns to unoccupied corners of the world; his is a perception cleansed of intents and purposes. Almost without exception, his poems record ordinary occasions and average moments, full of the weather and what natural life can be glimpsed in an urban environment. 

Johnston’s essay concludes with a short interview with Mills:

DJ: What difference has place made to you as a poet? Has it mattered that you live in Chicago? Partly, I ask because there is something incredibly particular about the observations, but then also general on another level. Particular to clouds, but not place names — broader than the local experience.

RM: A lot of the poems, particularly in the latter thirty years that I worked, a lot of the attention there is on small objects. A lot of things are taken from just taking a walk, doing an errand. Walking around the city of Chicago is very urban, very gritty; at the same time, it has been called the Garden City. Walking by vacant lots, with weeds and wildflowers, and brambly stuff in the course of running an errand or walking to work, the attention to those little things, the sticks and leaves, they seem to be susceptible to some kind of transformation or reconstruction that the poem might make out of it. There is a lot of interest on my part in trying to render these things.

Professor emeritus at the University of Illinois—Chicago, Mills’s most recent books are Grasses Standing: Selected Poems (Asphodel, 2000) and Essays on Poetry (Dalkey, 2003).

[ES, 2006]

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