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Eileen Myles | 241 to understand I want to show mine something different the ripples I’ve become I’m influence the way language changes rocks heal & burn meat stretches your little round animal face keeps coming around the corner but oh no now you’re coming down I’m looking up poetics statement My poems are comfortable with the idea that experience is a kind of knowing and that technology endlessly delivers new ways for us to describe how that knowing occurs. Putting a book together lately I remembered how I’d initially (like in the 70s) considered poetry a recording plain and simple. And now all these new forms of recording are amplifying and multiplying and frothing up the way I see. More and more the pleasure becomes how absolutely little I can do and still maintain a connection between this thought, this vista and that. The thrill for me is always the looming possibility of disconnection. The slim fact of the need to write at all instead of merely enjoying the hum. I have to add that as a female I consider myself living in a storm at sea. Inside our very intense relationships every woman I know struggles deeply. I read once that analysts in the twentieth century discovered that shell-shocked men in world war I resembled “neurotic” or “hysterical” women in ordinary time. From that I concluded that a woman exists in a constant state of war in this culture that still sees us as not quite human. I had considered focusing this statement on being queer but I actually think it stands up pretty well for all women, conventional or weird. Put two of us in a boat and it’s just pretty hard to sail or paddle. Because of all the pressure inside and out. I think relationships between women, couples and groups of us are always occurring in 242 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century a storm. The way this is definitely revealed in the larger culture (well I am getting queer now) is how everyone laughs when they hear the word lesbian . Try lesbian golfer, lesbian real estate agent, lesbian poet in a crowd and it always creates a roar. It’s how people acknowledge that they know this thing is real. Their laughing discomfort. People are quickly laughing at the strangeness of women and so how can two women for example decide to have a life together. Why would anyone purport to live next to society and call that a life. Yet to do the ridiculous thing in writing or in living has to yield a wider truth in exchange for the estrangement. It’s a new kind of energy, this impossible knowing plus the technology. You’re on your own time now. Go ahead. That’s what my work is all about. “when we’re alone in public”1 The Poetry of Eileen Myles Maggie Nelson Over the past thirty years, Eileen Myles has become a legendary and transformative figure in American literature and culture, by means of accomplishing two things. First, she has produced a prolific, explosive, expansive body of work that has established her as one of America’s most important poets—one who has worked in and over the shimmering space between “lyric” and “language,” fragment and narrative, the personal and the political, the minimal and the extravagant, the mundane and the mythic, the cerebral and the visceral, the particular and the universal, the powerless and the empowered. Second, by dint of her audacity, generosity , tenacity, and vision, she has also invented a completely new role for a female poet—and by extension, a female human being (indeed, any human being, should women ever be acknowledged as such a priori)—to inhabit in the public sphere. Certainly it is not every poet’s duty, nor is it within every poet’s field of desire or power, to invent or inhabit such a role. But when a poet manages to do so, as Myles has, it is a rare and lasting thing. Some of the grounds for Myles’s particularly insouciant form of poetic and political audacity can be located in her relationship to the socalled New York School. Over twenty years ago, Ted Berrigan called Myles “the last of the New York School poets,” and the label stuck, in part be- ...

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