Some men build

I haven’t seen Richard Miles for nearly forty years, since we were students together at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1969-1971. One winter evening he hosted a social event at the house in which he lived. As I recall, he had been preparing, masterfully, a beef stew with a connoisseur’s wealth of strange ingredients; he had had it on the stove for three days. He served martinis. He had picked us up in his BMW 2002. The thirty or so persons present shifted into pairs and groups throughout the rooms, and included not just students and faculty from the Workshop, but various characters from around Iowa City: doctors, lawyers, neighbors. That evening was the occasion of my initial underestimation of both the excessive influence and splendor of martinis.
There were too few pieces of tableware. The person to whom I was then married and I ate stew together from a handled pot, and we’d had to share a spoon; we drank martinis from jelly jars.
At other times, I found peyote quite amusing; sleep deprivation is a magnificent sort of trans-departure; and a few years ago during three episodes of cardiac arrest and the associated blows of ‘otherness’ that is sometimes connected with metaphysical transition, I was an eagle awing. These differentiated swoons had their only precedent that night in Iowa, when the bits of conversation I overheard sounded like Fitzgerald talking to himself while writing GATSBY, and felt like what Stravinsky may have been integrating while pre-composing his first notions of THE RITE OF SPRING. When Dick drove us back to our quonset married-student housing borghetto near the stadium, the appearance of the lights of the city and the flickering light-ripples on the late-night river suggested a welding of two types of imagination and one form of practicality from which ever since my concept of the surety of metaphor has derived.
It has been noted before, probably many times, that the more accomplished and ambitious writers at Iowa were sluiced into careers as millworkers at colleges all over America and that they supped with an unsavory eagerness at the troughs of publishers’ fancies. Other persons who lived in Iowa City for two years, and who merely regarded the enterprise as a free, two-year opportunity to attend a rich banquet with very smart, temporary lovers, or an immersion in literary criticism rather than creative writing, proceeded to madhouses, or genuinely unique callings, or they subjected themselves to courageous or dangerous paths: Reza Aslan, David Milch, and many others now safely outside the Tupperware of Writing.
[But Iowa City was grand; I loved it. I sat on the bench for Manchester United!]
Dick had gracious manners. Very Vermont. It was evident that he was up to something else. Kathleen Fraser told me she thought he might be “into stocks and bonds.”
A brief biographical note states:
Richard Miles was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 1945 and moved with his family to Arlington, Vermont in 1949.He attended The Hotchkiss School and graduated from The University of Vermont with a B.A. in English and from the University of Iowa with an M.F.A. in Poetry. In the summer of 1975 Mr. Miles started the Aspen Writer's Conference and Workshop with two friends, Peter Sears and Kurt Brown. In 1979 Mr. Miles stopped teaching to publish The Evener, a draft horse magazine. At this time he also took up commercial stonework. On moving to the coast of Maine in 1997 and building a studio, he was able to concentrate the sculptural essence of his walls and chimneys into smaller outdoor pieces. Mr. Miles continues to teach poetry at The University of Maine Machias. He feels that the stones, too, have a voice if not consciousness.