Stacy Boe Miller is a local poet, writer and editor based in Moscow, Idaho. She was the Poet Laureate of Moscow for three years. Boe Miller sat down with NWPB’s Phineas Pope to talk about what the future of poetry looks like.
Phineas Pope: How did you get interested in poetry and begin that journey?
Stacy Boe Miller: I have written poetry for as long as I can remember. I've kept a journal since about age nine, and a lot of it was poetry. My dad, I think, picked up on the fact that I was interested in poems. I was raised in a church where we sang a lot, and so maybe it was that, like the rhyming and the meter.
Pope: Does your poetry have a theme?
Boe Miller: That's like (a) poet's scariest question when people ask. There are actually memes about people asking, ‘What's your poetry about?’ I do. I have several themes. I write a lot about family, about motherhood, growing up in the West, growing up very religious and coming away from religion. I write a lot about bodies, aging bodies, my children, the women I came from who didn't have the means or know how to put their lives into art.
Pope: What role do you think poetry has in community?
Boe Miller: I think that poetry is such a communal experience for many reasons. First of all, it's short, and so I know it's intimidating to people, but it's at least a small package that can be shared quickly, can be memorized. And people who often say they're intimidated by poetry, or what I hear a lot is ‘I don't know what poetry means,’ and I encourage people to think of it like music.
If you hear a composition, you don't always ask yourself, ‘What does that mean?’ You just allow yourself to let it make you feel something. And I encourage people to do the same with poetry, to just let themselves feel. And if they're feeling something, it means the poem is working.
Pope: In such a fast-paced digital world, do people still have the patience for poetry?
Boe Miller: God, I hope so. I think that the pendulum will swing for some people who feel tired of the fast-paced world. [I] can only speak for myself and my circle, but I long for spaces where we slow down and connect with one another, outside of social media, or outside of those platforms where there's something between us and where we're all just together.
And I think that reading someone's book, or going to a poetry reading, or sitting down and having someone write you a poem, I think those are spaces that people will long for more and more.
I think we thought that social media would be a place where we would all get closer, and there are probably some ways that we did. But I think some people feel more isolated than ever. And I think art, and spaces like poetry or a poet laureate program, those kinds of things can bring people back into a shared sense of community.
Pope: Is there a way where social media and poetry can overlap?
Boe Miller: Yeah, they absolutely have. And it's such a two-sided coin, because sometimes I feel like it can be really easy to add a graphic to a few lines or something and make it seem like a poem on Instagram.
And sometimes, for someone like me who's spending maybe three years on a poem, I think, well, ‘that is cheating,’ but it absolutely isn't.
It's just another way to engage with poetry, and the beauty of that is more people know about poets and poems and poetry than ever before, because of things like Instagram poets, or the ways that social media can elevate voices that maybe would never have been discovered before.
Pope: What's the future of poetry?
Boe Miller: Oh my gosh, I don't know. That's something I think about and worry about. It's such an important part of my life. I think a lot of artists worry about that with AI. I don't know. I don't know.
Pope: Because ChatGPT can spit something out — it might not be very good.
Boe Miller: Yeah. I think the thing that ChatGPT can't maybe do is access my memories … My memories in my brain, or speaking for any poet or artist, come with this language and image hoard that don't belong to anyone else.
Mine are a pasture in the northeast corner of Wyoming with a very specific mother and siblings and a very specific horse and dog. And ChatGPT doesn't have those things. And I think that when we especially express, and this feels counterintuitive, but our most specific experiences and memories, those are what really speak to other people. And I think that's something ChatGPT can't offer yet.
Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.
