 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
||
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
||
March 4, 1999
Dear Rachel,
Thanks for your note. I like your questions. So I'll bomb through them and answer them all a little bit, some more.
Punk was a huge influence. I came to New York in the seventies and punk was in full swing within two years of my arrival. Punk gave new permission to be angry, to be brief and incisive. Dumb and powerful. It wasn't touchy feely like the hippie movement, and it wasn't middle class. A big piece of the anger of punk was directed at capitalism, and by poor kids. It was ugly too, not pretty or "beautiful." In many ways punk resonated well with New York's foul beauty.
I very much chose to be identified with the New York School. Upon seeing Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler's poems I looked for everything else like them or by them. I loved their pulsing speech rhythms, well OHara's, and the active construction of a poem as a pile of things you see, and pass. There is a certain way the New York School was utterly new to me in the seventies that would be too cliched to be possible now. I think it's true that I'm that, the last one, though I'm not only that.
I found poetry reading styles peculiar and pretentious when I began to go to readings. I liked the normal speech rhythms of performance artists like Spalding Gray. I always like good talk, period. I saw Jack Nicholson in a movie once in which he was a sensitive late night talk show host. I like how he whispered into his tape recorder. Talking like myself always seemed like the correct delivery. I'm pre-slam. I don't really like the frantic hard sell or even the commercial composure of the slam reading style. I manage to hear my poems when I write them. It feels like listening, composition does.
I think poetry is pretty wreathy for people. In general people select the poetry that most rewards their own present or imagined station in life. I've clung to some of my regional accent, my class background persists in my work.
It's my material, almost. Sexuality is also class. I've absolutely been punished for what I promote in my work. I have a rudimentary need to shock. In the midst of an aesthetically pleasing poem I loved the bizarre impact of say the word pussy. Perhaps this is childish of me, but it still is a thrill to talk dirty in church or in the pews of the fussy poetry world. My work is received oddly and enthusiastically, but not critically. I think often I'm received like a big bozo.
Dogs are big bozos. I genuinely wanted a dog when I was a kid-so desperately that some part of me was transmuted to dog. Dog = desire, or even yearning. I think there's a lot of shame around desire, neediness, impulses being touted, hopefully being gratified shamelessly and bluntly. There's a huge appeal in all that for me. It's very anti-catholic which I also am.
My poetry practice is pretty constant. I try to track what's there. Obviously in tumultuous times there's more to track. I'm stimulated by weather and all kinds of environment. I've been spending a lot of time by the sea lately and I have lots of landscape, sky, shifting skies are flooding my work. I carry a small notebook and write as I'm moved. I would carry poems more in my head when I was younger, letting them build all day. I'm clearer and less retentive now.
My works in progress? I'm writing a huge book of sky poems. My novel, Cool for You is nearly done after tons of editing. I revise poems slightly, though sometimes I wait years to begin. In general I throw things out, streamline them, see where I can leap too. Most poems err by being too long, saying too much. Too many words is always the best critique of a poem. Which words stay and which words go, of course, is the problem of a lifetime of writing poems.
Long prose works have to be revised a lot because so much time passes during the writing process, and the point of revision is to make the time of writing be transparent. In prose you want the consciousness to be so full that a shift of attention merely feels like a slight tugging. Are you a writer?
Good luck, Rachel.
Sincerely,
Eileen
EILEEN MYLES'S much-awaited novel, Cool for You, has just come out from Soft
Skull press. Myles has been reading and performing her poems, stories and
theater pieces in New York, across the country and in Europe, Iceland and
Russia since the mid-seventies. A virtuoso performer of her own work, Myles
has been a singular inspiration for female artists of all stripes. Says Time
Out, "This fiercely independent poet's writing style is marked by velocity,
risk-taking and adventure." Dorothy Allison says of Cool for You: "Eileen
Myles is a genius." Myles's books include Skies (forthcoming, 2001),
School of Fish (1997) Maxfield Parrish (1995) and Not Me (1991). She published
her first full-length collection of stories, Chelsea Girls in 1994. In 1995,
with Liz Kotz, she edited the best-selling The New Fuck You/adventures in
Lesbian Reading (Semiotext(e)) which won a Lambda Book Award (as did School
of Fish.) >From 1984-86 Myles was the Artistic Director of St. Mark's Poetry
Project. Last spring she taught in the graduate departments of Art Center
in Pasadena and Otis College of Art & Design. Back in New York she teaches
public writing workshops, and also is a regular faculty member of the summer
programs of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO and the Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown, MA. In 1992 she conducted an openly female write-in campaign
for President of the United States. She is a frequent contributor to Bookforum
, Art in America, The Village Voice, The Nation, The Stranger, and Nest.
