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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- Eileen Myles | 243 cause Myles never really chafed against it. When asked in a 2000 interview with poet Frances Richard if the appellation still resonated with her, Myles responded: It depends on who asks. Once I was introduced at a reading by someone whom I thought of as a Language poet, and when they described me as “New York School”’ I experienced it as a critique—like I was retro. But, yes, those were the writers (O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, Guest) who woke me up, who gave me a sense of what an adventure being a poet could be . . . Ultimately, though, “New York School” just means I learned to be a poet in New York. As an aesthetic it means putting yourself in the middle of a place and being excited and stunned by it, and trying to make sense of it in your work.2 Myles here points out how the dimensions of a label are necessarily defined by a host of social contingencies: particular mentors, friendships, and other personal relations; specific aspects of a specific city; the contexts in which a term gets circulated—literally, who speaks it—and so on. Her ease with the label thus has much to do with her long-standing interest in the formation and power of aesthetic and social communities: “I move in groups,” she explains to Richard. Myles’s presence on the New York School scene has also disallowed the all-important queerness of the New York School surreptitiously to slip into signifying only male homosexuality. Myles has audaciously championed the queerness of her predecessors and contemporaries, and labored tirelessly to record the “vivid and close-knit way of life” she has shared since the late ’70s “with a number of dykes and fags, mostly artists.” And while many critics interested in the New York School have been content to chart its lineage through the great but mostly straight cadre of writers such as Ted Berrigan, Charles North, Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, Tony Towle, Paul Violi, and others, Myles...

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