Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles: An Intro

It was easy to be great in the mid-70s in the East Village of New York City. We had nothing else but our greatness. It was the last chance to live cheaply in this city. Wage earning was very peripheral, a nuisance but an occasional necessity. We were united in our crappy living styles, our walk up apartments with tubs in the kitchens and plaster walls cracking, roaches, refrigerators empty except for Budweiser, mayonnaise and mustard. There were aspects of glory about not being responsible. To us, writing poems, attending each others' public readings, and sitting around at home and reading books was top priority.
   This concentration necessitated relief in watching ball games on TV and lots of hanging out with each other, smoking dope, drinking, and sharing all manner of drugs. Our excesses would eventually land many of us into 12-step programs and various other therapies. Others moved away, slowed down, died, deteriorated. But not yet.
    What was there for a young person to live for in the 70s? In the early part of the decade, the choice was to go die in Vietnam or become a bohemian. By the 80s, Reagan's gnarled face spoke omnipotently from tv sets polluting our respect for expression and logic with doublespeak and snake oil lies. The arts were under attack. Anyone who had a thought was a threat to the power elite. Personal expression seemed to be damned. We were still shaking from having seen John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, the Chicago 8, the students at Kent State silenced by overpowering authority or gunfire for daring to speak. Watergate and the Vietnam War had confirmed our distaste for the ruling class.
    Poetry was an appropriate outlet for some of us. Audiences were small enough that there was little threat to the state. If it was preaching to the converted, it was a congregation in need of mutual support and sustenance, because the world outside of the poetry reading venues was intolerant, it seemed, of youthful dissonance. Alienated from a society that would have preferred to go on pretending that everything was OK (remember the bumper sticker: "Love It or Leave It"), we were relieved to have found in each other an enclave of like-minded souls.
    Only the more adventurous moved into the East Village. What charm the place had was provided by the rootedness of the Polish butcher shops and the Italian and Ukrainian grocers. It was a poor, working class neighborhood whose scale felt human, few buildings at this point more than five or six stories tall. You could live here on the cheap, but the tradeoff was you sacrificed middle class comforts. A hundred years ago it'd been where Jewish and East European immigrants settled. And it had been a cheap enough neighborhood that marginal artists like Kerouac and Ginsberg and Charlie Parker had lived here in the 50s and the hippies hung in the 60s (the Fillmore East was here).
    So there was a tradition of artists nesting here when, in the mid-70s, a new crop of poets found themselves assembled at The Poetry Project. The Project, located at St. Mark's Church on Tenth Street and Second Avenue, had been run since the mid-60s by Anne Waldman and others and, along with the first Nuyorican Poets Cafe on East 6th Street, was the most prominent poetry scene in the neighborhood. Its aesthetic was decidedly anti-academic with a focus on the daily personal response to ordinary events and an activist's call for engagement. Scheduled readings and workshops made it a magnet for those seeking alternatives to the 9 to 5 lifestyle and those who had felt marginalized and rejected in the towns and suburbs they'd grown up in. The poets who gathered at the Poetry Project around this time were united for the most part in a sensibility of living for poetry. This was the stage Eileen Myles chose and the state of the union that was chosen for her.
    As people inclined to literature, this group had, for the most part, been alienated by the ivory tower poems imposed in school. Textbook poems were as distant from our experience as the age in which they'd been written. We'd discovered Ginsberg outside of school and through him were led to others whose voices were more compatible to our needs. There was no time for sculpted magnificence in this poetry, it was not intended for some elite blessed with the privilege necessary for cultural sophistication.
    Eileen's poems were immediate and conversational, friendly and chatty, something she might say in a phone conversation or over a drink at Grassroots, the Orchidia, the "Ukrainian" Bar, or Club 57. And that was a very deliberate and very courageous choice to make: to not appeal to the acceptance of the establishment. Who else was gauging success but those in power to bestow awards, respect, credentials, recognition? As far as I remember, in your twenties you want to be loved and accepted. In our little closed world we'd found people to share with. We didn't have to appeal to the universe anymore. This might have been a liability as far as finding a wider audience for our writing, but the larger universe had already refused us. And in finding each other, we could, for this short time at least, refuse to grovel for wider recognition. It was enough to celebrate our immediate community: by hearing each other's work at readings at the Poetry Project, lofts, any dive that would host a reading series; in workshops led by Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan; and by printing each other's poems in mimeo and offset magazines.
    Eileen's work, more so than anyone else's in the East Village, chose to ignore the conventions of traditional forms. Even the work of Ted Berrigan, our most esteemed mentor, was grounded in sophisticated poetic traditions — French cubism, dada, the Harvard-Cole Porter wit of Frank O'Hara. Eileen's writing was willing to abandon the privilege that a veneer of sophistication claims. She was not willing to cheat by dressing her presentation in the trappings of alleged authority. She was not about to rely on her power as a member of a ruling class to luxuriate in the comforts of privilege. Anyway, as a woman and as a child of the working class, she'd been ill-considered, denied access and shut out. She could see the dry well and chose to move on.
    We all did what we could, didn't we, filling a spiritual and social emptiness with externals like booze, pills, sex, restlessness. But Eileen also had the gift to recognize the horror of it all and to be honest about it. The poems were redemptive in this way, dredging some value out of the muck of ordinary youthful experience. This wasn't a cheery act to gain acceptance by being so pleasant everyone around would want to be your friend. This was a much braver act, declaring the "suckiness" of it all. The French took angst. We had desperation salvaged by a search for meaning — complaint as a form of hopefulness. With complaint there's an assumption that a conflict can be resolved. We'd learned that from Allen Ginsberg. Our own creative urges were howls of personal venting, a belief in breath that expected contact and demanded meaning in our act of sharing and in the act of expressing.
    I can remember how relieved I felt first encountering Eileen's poetry. It was so accessible to me. I knew what she was talking about. I liked the quick way she jumped from phrase to phrase, one idea kicking off an association which led to further associations, but all contained in a form. I enjoyed this freedom to let the act of writing take you where it might lead. It was like a musical theme stated, and then a solo, then a return to the theme. Never a sense that this person was just spewing off. There was always intention and a goal, and I liked going along for the ride because I knew there'd be a payoff and the journey was a lot of fun. I found her confessional opening up of herself invigorating. She was saying stuff I hadn't been able to verbalize, poem by poem finding a voice to speak what had for so long been deemed unspeakable. I felt like I'd found a friend in this poet.
    Here was a poet who was fallible like me and didn't speak from a place of assuredness and wisdom and authority. It was a fresh young voice from the blue collar plains of Massachusetts outside of Boston. Each of her poems was the crystallization of a moment's thoughts and response to an experience. What distinguished it from ordinary diary writing was its public address, its reach to be heard, its intent to be responded to. The poems were charged with a delight at having found a medium to communicate intangible yet vital information on the state of the individual and the roller coaster emotional responses to daily events.
    I responded to her attachment to her immediate surroundings, the belief that the present is all important. Her work keyed me in to an appreciation of the now, an acceptance of the moment and the current circumstance. To not postpone or procrastinate expecting some deliverance or something better to occur, like an afterlife in heaven. Her poems weren't about enshrining an epiphanous moment into some startling and meaningful revelation to tack to the refrigerator like a Hallmark card, they were an opportunity to review the past and transform experience into something new and useful.
    Eileen's poems caught for me the rhythms and frenetic pace of the city and the vigor of a young person out to experience as much as possible. The East Village was about recklessness. We were all here to indulge our senses and intellect as much as possible. And Eileen's poems were charged with that electricity of the eager, her teeth clamped on the power line, ready to sacrifice every last speck of energy to respond honestly and as fast as possible to the circumstances around her, her internal jazz processing and finding a place for the moment.
    I responded to the Imagination I encountered in her poems that, as Wordsworth puts it (in The Prelude), is "absolute strength/And clearest insight." The poem became a canvas where she could work out the sketchings of her imagination. With utmost respect for the poem's transformative power, Eileen, it seemed to me, strove for lucidity in her poems. She used the confessional form not to ask forgiveness, like St. Augustine, but to proclaim the discordance and struggle of an ordinary life made special by her artwork. It was self-esteem as an art form.
    I loved her declarative frankness, the way she proclaimed a place for her waywardness and her erratic experiences. She championed an ugly duckling role without needing to transform into something beautiful. She accepted herself for what she was, admitting the irregularities and the chips, sustained in her identity by claiming the turf she inhabited as valuable land. It was an outsider's stance I'd gotten a glimpse of in Baudelaire and Rimbaud, but Eileen's position was more immediate to the time and place. Brando, James Dean and Janis Joplin seemed more her antecedents.
    Eileen in her work practically invited us into bed with her, and she didn't bother changing the sheets. Her invitation, her terms. This is all twenty years ago now, the time of her first two or three books. Eileen has long since remade herself as a sober person and a lesbian. A novel segment I heard her read from recently, continues her approachable, propulsive, kinetic Irish storytelling pyrotechnics.

   (This article originally appeared in Talisman, Number 17, Summer 1997, thanks to editor Ed Foster