Coming After: Essays on Poetry

6. Eileen Myles in Performance

57 Eileen Myles in Performance “I don’t make up much,” Eileen Myles says in her essay “How I Wrote Certain Of My Poems.” “I don’t think most poets do.” Now this isn’t true, is my reaction. The fact is that many poets do “make things up,” practice the art of imagination inventing Agures and stories for example, as well as the form of the poem, Myles’s chosen focus. Myles perpetually reinvents form as a curious Buidity: she imagines her way through each of her poems as if there were always a new path through a familiar but everdangerous landscape. Her poems consist of the path and the person who follows it, not so much the landscape—New York City’s East Village, which is well-known in the poems of others and in general well-known: I am Alled with the death of the streets, you’ve seen me before— you’re a witness to the death of my innocence. . . . —“Hot Night,” from Not Me In this poetry, the question is “Who’s walking there?” And so it is appropriate to begin writing about her with a quibble (whether or not poets make things up), since her poetry is so enclosed around the who of it, naturally inviting argument. I don’t intend to argue really, I’m just pointing out the possibility. Myles’s poetry presents a pretty naked self, lays self on the line: so there’s always the possibility of the reader’s reacting to this work as if it From Talisman, no. 17 (Summer 1997). were a person to be loved or liked or disagreed with or found obnoxious. The work is quite different from O’Hara’s or Berrigan ’s. The former was never so classical as when supposedly being most personal—what is the love in Love Poems (Tentative Title) if not that for the poem itself? And who is doing the loving, not a person, a poet. Ted Berrigan was most often engaged in placing elements of the inner and outer consciousness into composition with each other, in order to make something unlike its elements. Myles’s total project is, simply and grandly, the person herself as life and poem, style and content: Life is a plot to make me move. I All its forms, an unwitting crayon I am prey to the materials of me, combinations create me into something else, civilization’s inventions numb me, placate me carry me around. —“The Irony of the Leash,” from MaxCeld Parrish Eileen Myles’s work is heroic, monolithic, pure. The outward forms may vary, but the self at their center is constant; to maintain a stance for such a long time is courageous. Really the work hasn’t changed much over the years, since she realized what its nature would be, in the seventies, in the books A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains and Sappho’s Boat. The shape of the later longer poems in Not Me and MaxCeld Parrish: Early & New Poems is already essentially realized in early poems such as “The Irony of the Leash” and “Romantic Pain,” though she had not yet met James Schuyler and achieved her footlike short line, responding to but different from his own chiseled one. Hers pushes ahead into a long prose-sounding utterance, a longer “line” which comprises whole sentences (the whole utterance is more like the line than the lines are): They told me to meditate 58 59 so I pretended I was waiting in a Doctor’s ofAce. You can always pick up a magazine National Geographic go to China, but I’m here & the breezes admit it. —“A Blue Jay,” from Not Me Otherwise, her work feels as if it’s suffered little change; the plays and stories are a broadening of the essential form, which is the self performing and meditating on the performance. This is a saintly process, in that it’s very stripped and undistracted. The protagonist does not lead a saintly life except in being poor (she doesn’t want to be poor), and tends to contract towards herself rather than expand outwards into others or god, but her concentration is nonetheless of a saintly order. She identiAes with the warlike St. Joan, the most active and suspect of saints: A white dove came out of her mouth as she died. Five hundred and forty-eight years ago today. A dove leaped right...