Eileen Myles reads "Merk" (from the CD Sister Spit)

Eileen Myles is a "pure product" of New York City's East Village art scene. She gave her first reading at CBGB's in 1974, worked as assistant to the poet and art writer, James Schuyler, and from1984-86 was the Artistic Director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Poet, novelist, critic, lesbian culture hero and one-time presidential candidate, "she is the most immediate of poets, transforming the aesthetics of New York School poetry into the culture at large." Myles' recent books include School of Fish (1997) (which won a Lambda Book Award), Maxfield Parrish: Early & New Poems (1995), Not Me (1991), and a collection of stories, Chelsea Girls (1994), which has become a kind of cult classic. Myles is a stunning performer of her poems and stories, and has brought her words to venues as disparate as MOMA, Stanford, ICA, Lezbopalooza and DIA. She has toured Germany, Russia and Iceland. She has appeared notoriously with Sister Spit, San Francisco's all-girl spoken word posse. In 1995 Myles edited with Liz Kotz The New Fuck You/adventures in lesbian reading. Eileen Myles' articles and reviews have appeared in The Nation, The Village Voice, Civilizat ion, Art in America, Out and The Stranger. Most recently she won a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in Poetry and completed her first novel, Cool for You. She's at work on a new book of poems entitled Skies.

December, 1999
Eileen Myles
by Gerry Gomez Pearlberg
© 1999 Gerry Gomez Pearlberg

Gerry Gomez Pearlberg: Let's start with the two poems we're looking at: "Warrior" and "Crazy" from your book Maxfield Parrish: Early & New Poems. Say a few words about each poem -- where you were when you wrote them, what prompted them.

Eileen Myles: "Warrior" is a love poem. I was sitting in a car in upstate New York. In the parking lot of a plant nursery. We had just bought this beautiful potted plant that slightly resembled the flower in the poem and I was feeling sad about my love and it was beautiful the sadness and hard and pointed. I knew I would get screwed and I did. But I was really into it.

"Crazy" was written on the grounds of Christ in the Desert, a Benedictine monastery in New Mexico. It was after dinner and I was writing a poem on a rock at dusk and was feeling melancholy at my inability to move myself around in the world when I was younger. It seemed the world was open now, and I was older and hadn't known how to live when I was a kid. Was stuck. And look how beautiful the world was. Also I was healthy, off coffee and could go slower, repeating stanzas even as a way to move ahead, in the poem.

Pearlberg: That's interesting about "Crazy" because -- maybe it was the sage -- it reminded me of sitting on boulders in Taos, New Mexico, looking out on the world -- that vantage point and power of sitting on rocks while writing poems. Which brings to mind something you said in a class I took with you years ago, about feeling free to write wherever you are -- in the opera, at the movies, watching TV, wherever. What are some of the coolest places you've written poems?

Myles: I was at the Metropolitan Opera with Nicole Eisenman. I was assuming she would draw, so I brought a notebook. Writing a poem on an opera -- it's called "The Troubador" [School of Fish] -- was the best. I love writing poems on the small planes that leave Provincetown for Boston, and vice versa. It's very close -- to the weather and the ground and the other passengers and it's so stunning the air and water and the sky. It's as close as I will get to being an astronaut which would be the ultimate poet position.

Pearlberg: Both "Crazy" and "Warrior" exemplify the strong relationship between your poems and visual art. "Warrior" is a sketch -- one feels the pencil scuffling with the page. But it's colored pencils -- "How did such white meet such fuschia/& then hot pink. A smattering/of intelligent antennae/a scribble of brains..." I see the flower quickly sketched from life as the poem moves forth. Is that how you see it?

Myles: It was almost like a Nicole Eisenman drawing of both a flower and a girl. The colors were skin and petals, her and us, and the flower. It's all kind of scrambled for me. But I did draw it, write it fast in front of the thing, the plant. I like life writing.

Pearlberg: It's like Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers' manifesto on "How to Proceed in the Arts": "If you're the type of person who thinks in words -- paint!" I think you do paint, but you do it with poems. It's all through "Crazy," too, in which the first stanza especially is like moving one's eye over each detail of a landscape painting. What's the link between visual art and your poems?

Myles: My primary relationship to the world was visual--growing up I was the kid always drawing--at home, in school, after school classes etc. Everyone thought I would go to art school. Something shocked me out of it, but it's remained how I think and see. I've always looked at art, and for a while with some sadness because I thought maybe I should be painting, but in the '80s I worked at St. Mark's Poetry Project and we had an art auction and I got turned on about the art world, and crossed away from the sadness somehow. I started to write when I looked at it and thought about that as work. I have a good relationship with visual artists too because I often feel they like what I see in their work. I think I will make art again, actually am starting to now and I don't know how that will affect my writing.

Pearlberg: Another theme in your work has to do with nature and its intersection with the synthetic, manmade or "post-natural" world. In "Warrior," no one knows the flower's name -- and in the poem "Maxfield Parrish" you write:

You'd probably
laugh at the
flowers I
bought tonight.
Bluish purple
& they don't
even have
a name. "Name?"
pronounced the
man at the
fruit stand
he shook
his head
& laughed.

I love this idea of beautiful and nameless flowers sold at fruit stands and roadside farm stands. So sweet and sad. Such a perfect expression of life today, especially urban life. And you develop that throughout Maxfield Parrish . In your poem "Authenticity," you refer to a 21st century mode of ownership which includes "...having a/vision that's/real and fake". And in the title poem "Maxfield Parrish," you write: "I needed something fake to/start me up." It's even on the cover of your book -- a drawing by Nicole Eisenman where a little group of flowers are constructing a much bigger flower hammered together from planks of wood. Can you talk about the personal meanings you ascribe to this image and this idea?

Myles: I think, um, I think that's my symbol for art. Or my equation. Something that's real and fake. Like Maxfield Parrish's blue on the flowers. Something tweaked so it is a flower but it's reminiscent of technology, perhaps. Poetry seems like fake nature to me. I mean the made aspect is like an intervention. Maybe there's a feeling that I'm fake, that I'm fake nature. The way a human can't just sit in a park, she has to mythologize the place, and make some other picture out of what she sings so she can "own" it in some fashion, feel powerful in her stillness.

Pearlberg: Was the cover art for Maxfield Parrish created in response to your poems?

Myles: I think Nicole just showed me some stuff she was working on and she had almost finished that drawing and said I could have it and I sat there and made her finish it. I just sat and the table over her shoulder waiting. But I know, it's so perfect. It's really funny. I suppose the made flower is like the big stupid poet, the dork in the world.

Pearlberg: That's just how it feels. Now, as you said, "Warrior" is a love poem. To a flower. But also to a lover. The "you" in the poem fluctuates, doesn't it? From flower to reader to beloved. And all three at once.

Myles: I think there's a lot of hiding going on, not that it works, but as soon as the feeling or the meaning got too strongly about the girl or the flower I dodged into the other subject. They really were the same for me in the moment. And the context this was all going on in was kind of public, there was sense of us being observed as a couple, it was a public-feeling relationship so I could almost address her as a statue out there, being sized up or something and I could address that assessment of my love, the flower, the girl. I knew that would be part of my history, how we looked.

Pearlberg: "Crazy" on the other hand, strikes me as an anthem to poetry: the immediacy, excitement and stillness of the creative process: "So my legs are crossed/on the perfect rock/having run home fast to/get this pen, looking out on/a different night,/duller, but I know that/river now. Having been/all wet & covered with mud/but I crossed it, and/thought that would solve/my problem. It has,/sort of." The river? The perfect rock? The problem? Can you talk about it?

Myles: I think it's about time passing. It was a literal river. I crossed it, got muddy. Seemed simple. But the world was familiar now, not mysterious. Oh yeah and I had my pen. The scene was familiar. Now that was the problem. How do you write about a familiar scene? When you're ready. And there's nothing stopping you. Where do you start? It's different when you can't move. It's a different problem.

Pearlberg: Your poems remind me of lassos. They circle round the things you're talking about, gaining on their target, which is almost always a moving target. There's a brushing against ideas and things in your poetry -- assertive language and a very confident touch, yet at the same time it's so light. The poem doesn't grip its material too tightly. Would it be fair to say your poems invert the idea that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"? Because I think in your poems it's the other way around -- the bird in the bush is worth two in the hand.

Myles: I'm making real things abstract. Maybe that's just language. On some level things are so obvious, that it feels like they're dripping with irony. So I'll start with that, it's like thick paint. And then that feels silly so I'll lighten up and then remember some aspect of what felt heavy that really was true. I feel like I keep changing the station on the things I'm thinking about. My general feeling about the kind of poet I am is philosophical. I mean I know the world's real, but I like to play with it, that fluxy part of its nature. It's dreamy. I heard about a book called the phenomenology of fire. That sounds so interesting.

Pearlberg: Your poetic approach seems linked to the idea of the relaxed yet alert mind -- of watching the mind in action. Is there a Buddhist influence there?

Myles: I bumped into a little zen in high school. It was in the air then, J.D. Salinger, etc. It's such a part of '60s non-academic poetry. And I began some sitting about two years ago--I haven't been doing it all lately, but that really gave me a sense of poetry as a practice as one might have a zen practice. Something one returns to continually. There's a Buddhist saying: try, try, try one thousand times. I like the notion of continuing things. I can hardly do anything that I don't think I can continue. Especially if I can pick it up and put it down and still be doing it. Something I can return to. Gertrude Stein is very zen to me.

Pearlberg: How so?

Myles: Stein's zenness refers to her loyalty to "being." She refers a lot to that lively thing, the animative quality in a human -- it's what she would be seeking in someone she might be making a portrait of. All in all in her explanation of literature she's obsessed with motion, movement, circulation, aliveness. I see her as connected to a particularly American sense of literature in which the expansiveness of now, not a representation of it, but it, itself in literature is the real subject. That's zen to me.

Pearlberg: Have all these years of living in "poetry-mind" changed or altered your brain? If so, how so?

Myles: I think you do a lot of ...is beta the dream brain wave? I think I was always this way but picking a profession that really utilizes it and living a lot of your life on those terms is pretty monumental I think.

Pearlberg: You generally use very idiomatic speech in your poems. The first line in "New Poem," for example, is: "My lover came over my house". The first time I read that I thought, "It's a typo." Then I thought, "No, this is how people talk." It thrilled me to see the word "to" left out. And it seems like an emblematic line of Eileen Myles poetry. Can you talk about your choice to use "American speech" and why it compels you so?

Myles: It's in the sound. If you move your mouth around those words and then put the to in you'll see what I mean. It stops the mmmm thing that's very about lover. As soon as "to" gets in there you're going to the bank, you're going to the store, it's business as usual.

Come over my house feels private. I got permission in graduate school to do this. In a linguistics class they talked about black english being a real english and it seemed that the english I had grown up speaking could be a dialect I could write in. I became immediately unalienated from the act of writing. There's a scene in D.H. Lawrence where the son sticks his head in the window of the cashier of the coal office to get his dad's check and talks about changing his english. I'm so aware of that, of so many englishes and how often I'm cobbling together (like Nicole's flower) my talk, either on the page, or in my mouth, or in my head.

Pearlberg: You have said, "There is no such thing as free verse." Could you explain what you mean by that?

Myles: There's pleasure and pain--some words feel better than others at certain moments, there's the real beat of drama in speech. You yell wait, and they turn, time passes and you say your next line. There's that kind of syncopation within the mentality of a poem and there's nothing free about accurately describing that. The whole [William Carlos] Williams thing of the variable foot means that I believe, like jazz, it's improvisatory, but it's not free. It's wild and it's alive and it has a real measure.

Pearlberg: Speaking of the "mentality of the poem," it's hard not to notice that though your poems are very much rugged individualists, they're also incredibly interconnected, conversing with and replying to each other so that it's difficult to talk about one poem without referring to others.

Myles: I do feel like I keep building a world. Probably when I started writing I heard that Wallace Stevens felt that way, that it was all one poem connecting and that idea solved a lot of dilemmas for me just imagining being a poet -- about poems being small things -- they are, but they're infinitely skeiny and mean everything you always meant.

Pearlberg: There are no dogs in either "Crazy" or "Warrior," but in general your poems are heavily populated with dogs. Please discuss the role of The Dog in your poems.

Myles: As a child I wanted a dog so bad, an ally, someone, something that was mine. My wish was not granted and I think dogs represented that longing for a very long time in my life. To the point that that longing was me, on some level. I guess that was a problem when I got Rosie, my now almost 10 year old pit bull. I suppose I've become a little cornier a person and poet. The dog is "with" me now, on the outside. I broke my borders in a way, letting some of my inside out, and I've followed her a lot, I often write my poems from her perspective, it's a little broader than me. I think as a person lives, she either lets her experience change her, or not. Literally, with something or someone else in your life you start to think I wonder if Rosie would like. . . a life in the country, and so on. They become your excuse to cut a wider swathe.

Pearlberg: You've described the process of giving a poem a title as like 'throwing down your glove' as if to say, 'OK, here we go. I challenge you, the poem (or the world) to a dual." Tell me more about your relationship to poem titles -- how you do it, what you look for when reading other poets' poetry, etc.

Myles: The thing about titles changes as my idea about relationships shifts. I'm looking at Maxfield Parrish and the titles are very large in that book. I think I was thinking of them as these big transparent signs that could hold the poem or meet it, I mean serve as an introduction, or a sign. Yeah, these ones look pretty large to me now, sort of inclusive. I think my poems lately have been more specific, like "40th Street" or "Miss Me" but I guess you'd have to see the poems to see what I mean. I think more ironic is what I mean. Limited "seeming."

In other poets I think the title draws me in or keeps me out. Like those signs on the Little Rascals' clubhouse: Girls Keep Out! It strikes me that most people look for stuff they like in literature -- on a very goofy level, do you like flowers or dogs, do you enjoy an authoritarian tone, or are you playful. Do you think of yourself as Pop or traditional. Whatever. I was just thinking that if I saw a poem called "A Snowflake" I would probably like it. Is it attractive, for all the reasons language is attractive or not to the individual reader. In a way it's an ad for the poem.

Myles:I think I wanted to be a piece of nature, part of the flow, like a tree with a name, but not the one that connotes I. I was having a health crisis at the time, a potential gynecological disaster and I was doing all kinds of prayers and affirmations and was even willing to be a woman, be female if I could be cured. Somehow the humiliation of such a female title released me into the spell of the poem and I thought it might be good magic. I am okay.

Pearlberg: Do you see the poem as a magic thing?

Myles: Oh absolutely. I think a poet is casting a spell, making a very real ghost, or secretion of their existence as words, and that is magic. In that poem it was kind of a healing other I was trying to create in words, numbers, even, if you think of the word count, the beat as numerical somehow. I've been reading about the San Francisco poet Jack Spicer who called his own poetry workshop the magic workshop for not dissimilar reasons.

Pearlberg: In your poem "Merk," from School of Fish, you have a line I love: "...every poet I know is a partial artist/the lucky ones are dead/naturally incomplete..." What's the difference, career-wise, between a dead poet and a living one?

Myles: There's so much desire in poets that leaves us kind of absent culturally. You know like visual artists can be called partial artists, because they are part businessman, but most of us are part artist, part nothing, having no real way of attaching to society, but not unable to not do it either. The dead ones are done, somehow.

Pearlberg: If there were a Poetry Genome Project just for you, which poets or artists would you say have most contributed to your DNA?

Myles: Friends, of course. Ted (Berrigan) and Alice (Notley) and Jimmy (Schuyler). Nicole Eisenman and Michelle Tea. Vladimir Mayakovsky. Sam Shepard. Henry Miller, Violette LeDuc. Stein. Robert Smithson. Thoreau. Jill Johnston. Christopher Isherwood. Joni Mitchell. John Ashbery. Allen Ginsberg. Truffaut, John Cassavetes, Arthur Dove, Kurt Schwitters, Djuna Barnes, Yukio Mishima, Paul Violi, Elliot Smith, Susie Timmons, Jack Kerouac, Chantal Ackerman, Paolo Passolini, Bob Gluck, Dennis Cooper, Dodie Bellamy, Cecilia Dougherty, David Rattray, Bruce Chatwin, Eva Hess. Jefferson Airplane.