I believe I first encountered Eileen Myles work in the late 1970s/early1980s in Dennis Cooper’s feisty magazine "Little Caesar" and probably some other SoCal zines. I appreciated her work then—always have a soft spot for the New York school, new and old (Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, Tony Towles, Anselm Berrigan)—but her work dropped off my radar (as, alas, much work can in thirty-five years of reading poetry).
She popped up on my radar with a vengeance last night at a reading at WSU. Myles was electric—not lightning but a steady pulsing wiry current. She deftly played her audience of lit, creative writing, rhet comp, and teaching majors. That I want to read more of her work speaks most to her performance. I want to read The Inferno, more of her poems, and any and all pieces about James Schuyler.
Two questions I wish I would have asked: We’re you working with James Schuyler when he wrote the exquisite “The Morning of the Poem”? There’s an expansive earthiness in that poem. What can you tell us about its origin/composition? And: You talked about how technology changes a poem, changes poetry, and suggested how change of place changes poetry. As you spend a semester in Missoula, how is your poetry changing? If you moved to Missoula, where would your writing move?
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