This website includes several sections at this point, and I keep adding more and more stuff (I should update this home page more often!)
The top banner here leads to several different starting points. As of 2023, there’s Carl Miller Poems, the Hawaiian Journal, several comics: the ongoing Molly Blue, the Antventures books, and the fanfictions of my alter-ego, Cloudmonet. Within each section, the “previous” and “next” links in the banner will guide you through the material, and each section has at least one contents or navigation page.
Most but not all of my poems are about things I’ve personally experienced, and arranged, not in the order I wrote the poems, but in the order the poems actually happened. Poems about historical figures are placed at whatever time I began writing them. Because there are hundreds of poems here, there’s a table of contents and an alphabetized title index.
These mundane facts may help you identify me, if you’re not sure which one of many possible Carl Millers I might be. I was born on Beethovan’s birthday, December 16, 1949, in Cleveland Ohio. I went to Memphis Elementary, Wilbur Wright Junior High, James Ford Rhodes High, and Case Western Reserve University, where I majored in biology, studied geology, and began writing poems. I've drawn comics since I was eleven.
In 1972 I moved to Marin County, California, where I was associated with the Family Mix in San Anselmo, which in my time functioned mostly as an informal school of art, ceramics, and astrology. In 1974 I moved to Humboldt County, first Redway, then Briceland. My comic, Jane Doe, appeared for two years in a local alternative paper, Star Root. I’ve written three dragon novels, The Warrior and the Witch, The Goblin Plain War, and Dragonbound, which were published by Ace Science Fiction in the early 1990’s and presently out of print. Last time I looked, these were available used from various online book dealers.
I am also the online artist and fanfiction author, cloudmonet.
Designed and coded by Carl Miller. All contents copyright © 1970 - 2013 Carl Miller. Some poems have been previously published in various little magazines between 1971 and 1984. Some were included in the Garberville Anthology and Lost Coast: Poems and Stories from Humboldt County, California, both co-edited by me. Some have appeared in self-printed chapbooks.
In January through April, 2005, I posted 79 pages of poems here, about 500 of them, describing events in my life, as well as moments from the lives of artists, scientists, and lighthouse keepers.
In February, 2009, I added page 80. July 2009, I added new poems on pages 41, 76, and 80, and a new page, 81. In September 2009, I added more new poems to page 80, and split it in half, so the old page 81 with the Mount Whitney poems is now page 82, and I added pages 83-85. These pages gradually filled with more poems as my life’s unresolved plotlines got resolved. It helps that I’ve once again found poetry readings to join.
Summer 2010, there’s two new poems on page 70, and a geeky coding error on page 75 that befuddled some browsers got fixed. January, 2011, there’s new poems on pages 2, 13, and 69, and page 86 is added. May, 2011, I added page 87. By 2016, there’s 95 pages, poems added to pages 7, 21, 23 (which always belonged here but only recently got rewritten to my satisfaction). In 2023, I added two haiku to page 95, and created page 96, dated “ever after,” meaning anything from 2017-2023. This may get reorganized eventually.
The drawings and paintings are all connected in one way or another to the poems, such as the “Home in Cleveland” drawing on this page. All of these are my own work.
Some years ago, I moved some poems from page to page so that page breaks coincide with year breaks, and also put the page breaks between home poems and travel poems when this seemed appropriate. I tried to do it in such a way that most poems remain on the page they were on before, but some old internal links from external sites may have been broken. Whatever the poem is, it’s still here, and on the page before or after the one it was on before.
The Molly Blue comic section has been here since February, 2009, though I’ve been drawing this since September, 2007. Molly Blue is an adventure / comedy / romance set on a planet of tropical islands, with demons, frogmen, and big lizards, among other exotic curiosities. It’s now (January 2023) over 2050 pages long and getting updated about 3 times a month. Go check it out!
The first book of Antventures was inspired by a comic book I wrote and drew in 1961, based on some “let’s pretend we’re ants” games sort of like the space adventures I described in the poem “Star Games.” I was 11 at the time. This new comic is a complete remake. The main characters are now named Amy and Betty, females like real worker ants. The old comic books were inspired by my knowledge of arthropod natural history to some degree. I know much more now. The first two Antventures books are finished, and I’m starting a third.
Jane Doe is a comic I originally drew for Star Root, a local alternative newspaper, way back in 1977-1979. I started to work on redrawing and possibly expanding this comic for its 35th anniversary in 2012. This project seems to be stalled for now, but the five strips that are here do tell a complete story arc.
The Cloudmonet fanfiction section got created in the summer of 2006, at the request of some internet friends. I think I’ve written everything about Kim Possible and her friends and foes that I’m ever going to write. It was an interesting experience borrowing someone else’s characters, but I prefer creating my own.
Now for the rules. I don’t mind you printing out copies of my poems for your own use. I recommend copying and pasting to a word processor. You can make them look better that way. Please include my name as author on anything you print. As for commercial use, i.e. any sort of sales, that’s my job, and you’re not allowed to do it. Why would you want to try? Money? Poetry? I know from experience that it’s impossible to sell enough copies to pay for the printing.
As for the fanfictions, the characters belong to Disney, so the stories can’t be bought or sold at all, not even by me!
all pages copyright © 1970 - 2014 Carl Miller