Whale Oil (Monthly Chapbooks #2) by Tempest Miller

Annnnnd

Whale Oil is the second of Tempest Miller’s monthly chapbook series (which began in early 2024), and it offers a similar level of enjoyability as I found in the first one (England 2K State Insekt – my thoughts here).

There are some really great lines in here, some really great ideas and a few of the pieces really do come together beautifully.

As, though, with issue one of these monthly publications (which seem to still be going (as of mid-Feb 2025)), there’s an element of the work as a whole feeling a bit like notebooks… a bit like work in progresses, rather than a coherent selection of complete texts…

There are some poems in here that do sometimes feel like reading something you’ve already read earlier in the text… a near uncanny valley sense of doubling, poetic doppelgangers… ideas repeating and images repeated (if not necessarily imagery repeating verbatim) in such a way that it feels less like a designed thematic cohesion (or an intentional deeper exploration of an idea), than like Tempest Miller is working towards the final poem or the final image that best works with that item, idea, or image…

But maybe I’m being overcritical. Or maybe that’s entirely the point and I’m couching comment on intentionality as critique of execution? Certainly within the chapbook itself, there’s no explanation of the project’s aims and intentions… So they are the reader’s to assume…

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There’s a lot in Whale Oil about two things: fishing and ecclesiastical buildings.

Or or or images come from the sea… or from church buildings and the grounds of churches…

Though there are a few places… a few moments… more than a few lines… where these things feel like a…a…a…a… desired intentionality is being arrived at… a lot of the time it does feel like Miller is merely throwing ideas at a wall and seeing what sticks, though not as per ordinary poetic practice and doing that in ones private notebooks or a digital equivalent, Miller is instead doing it in monthly, public, chapbooks.

Honestly (and I wouldn’t say that if I was lying), I think it is genuinely an interesting way to approach publication and to approach poetry itself…

I certainly know that in the most fecund period[s] of my poetic career (a while ago whoops), I, too have spewed out words and ideas at an alarming rate, and not been quite certain what to do with all of that text, because obviously there aren’t enough magazines and anthologies and bus stops to get absolutely everything you ever write [potentially] in front of an audience… But what usually happens when you’re in one of those creative bursts is that you collate and edit and twenty poems that aren’t great end up becoming four poems that aren’t quite perfect and then those combine and melt down into one that just fucking works, and a collection arrives from this routine of disparate pieces, once seemingly different, slowly coalescing towards a shared motive or expression of a shared creative ideology. Yes.

So, ultimately I have to say that I do admire the chutzpah of Tempest Miller’s choice to publish like this, in making available what may well be everything he’s working on as he’s working on it.

And there are some pieces that do arrive (basically) fully formed, and there are pieces in here that really do shine on the page, that are electric, electrifying, evocative and really beautiful…

There’s writing in here that is careful, that is thought provoking and thoughtful, but there are other things in here that do (sadly) just feel like sort of thematic follow-ups to earlier pieces, as if Miller hasn’t quite let go of the idea, but rather than working on and editing the first piece, he’s instead…  y’know… expanded the material to work on, but then not edited it back down afterwards…

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I’ve got three more of these chapbooks and I absolutely will get to them at some point, because there are definitely enough ideas and lines and images within them to be interesting and engaging!

Whale Oil is not the half-thought-through ramblings of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing (and apologies if I made it sound like it might be), as there are lines and there are entire pieces in here that absolutely are worth engaging with…

[if time, insert here some examples of lines and entire pieces that I really enjoyed, and link to any that have been published elsewhere – if you’re reading this and you aren’t scott manley hadley, there wasn’t time… sorry]

Order the chapbook direct here via KDP.

Whale Oil is very enjoyable, but do go into it with an open mind, rather than with expectations of a flawless collection of writing…