Eileen Myles (born December 9, 1949) is an American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." The Boston Globe described them as "that rare creature, a rock star of poetry." They won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction in 2011 for their Inferno (a poet's novel) In 2012, Myles received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow (a memoir), which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life. Myles has been called "a cult figure to a generation of post-punk female writer-performers" and uses they/them pronouns.

Life and career

Early life and education

Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 9, 1949, to a family with a working-class background. They attended Catholic schools in Arlington, Massachusetts, and graduated from UMass Boston in 1971.

Myles moved to New York City in 1974 with the intention of becoming a poet. There they studied with Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Paul Violi, and Bill Zavatsky, In 1979 they worked as an assistant to the poet James Schuyler. They have stated their time there gave them the opportunity to rethink the institution that influenced their early work. During Reagan's presidency, 1981–1989, Myles dealt with the cuts to the NEA art budget and focused their energies on broadening the aesthetic and cultural range of the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Myles' leadership of the Project represented a generational shift away from the church's base, which until then been run by the second generation members of the New York School. Program Coordinators in this period were Patricia Spears Jones, and Jessica Hagedorn, and Myles invited Alice Notley and Dennis Cooper to teach. Myles then conducted an "openly female" write-in campaign for the office of President of the United States this gesture was meant to offer an alternative glimpse into what progressive, radical, and socially committed politics could look like.

Zoe Leonard's 1992 poem, "I want a president", which begins with the line: "I want a dyke for president", was written to celebrate Myles's presidential run.

Beginning in 2002, Myles began a five-year stint as a professor of writing at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Since leaving UCSD in 2007, Myles has been a Visiting Writer at Bard College, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Montana-Missoula, Myles was also approached by Clinton's campaign to write a poem, as part of "Artists for Hillary", a mostly-female group which included Jenny Holzer and Maya Lin, whose creative statements were testament to their support for Clinton's presidential bid. Myles's poem was entitled MOMENTUM 2016.

Personal life

They were previously in a relationship with poet Leopoldine Core in 2013. In May 2015, they began a relationship with television series creator Joey Soloway.

Written works

Poetry

By their own account, Myles moved from Boston to New York in 1974 "to be a poet," Myles's first book, The Irony of the Leash, was published by Jim Brodey from the St. Mark's Poetry Project in 1978.

In 1977 and 1979, Myles published issues of dodgems, a literary magazine, a title referring, in the vernacular of Great Britain, to bumper cars, specifically those of Revere Beach, MA. The title is said to serve as a metonym for the collision of aesthetic differences that characterized the poetry scene of that time. The dodgems issues featured poems by John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Charles Bernstein, as well as a letter from Lily Tomlin and an angry note from a neighbor; both issues are referenced in the book, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side—Adventures in Writing: 1960–1980, (which also describes St. Mark's), Not Me (1991) is Myles's most popular collection of poetry. It contains Myles work, "An American Poem," in which they fictionalize their identity and claims to be a "Kennedy", and comfortably addresses politics in the work. They first performed the work at P.S. 122 in New York City, during their tenure at St. Mark's. Since then "An American Poem" has been filmed and shown in film festivals all over the world, screening in New York and other major cities. It has been included, in translation, in German, Russian, and Italian anthologies of American writing. The trajectory of "An American Poem" is documented in Myles's novel Inferno (2010).

Myles produced Maxfield Parrish/early and new poems (1995), a collection of both new and selected poems on the theme of the surreality of sex. In the same year, Myles co-edited The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading (1995) with Liz Kotz, which is described as having a multi-genre approach and postmodern focus on reading rather than identity, and which is said to have offered something different from mainstream gay and lesbian poetry anthologies of the 1990s. Soon after, School of Fish (1997) appeared, the first work wherein Myles's dog, Rosie is featured, where Rosie served as a second camera in the poem's field of vision.

Myles published Skies (2000), a project begun in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the poet described the sky becoming "a new character in my life." The book is framed by a transcript of a panel at The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts featuring Helen Miranda Wilson, Frances Richard, John Kelly, Molly Benjamin, and Jack Pierson, who each spoke about their own relation to the sky. On My Way (2001) concludes with an essay about speech and class, "The End of New England."

Snowflake / Different Streets (2012) uses the technique of dos-à-dos binding to combine two distinct collections of poetry in the same physical book. As Ian Bodkin writes, Myles' poems "navigat[e] the ever-insular landscape of our technological culture that invades moments of quiet thought" in Snowflake, then "offers a sense of return to the people and places of intimacy, connections that bring her back to this world" in different streets. In the LA Review of Books, Brian Teare notes: "Though the book contains plenty of autobiographical detail concerning Myles' life as a writer and lesbian, such details remain themselves, no longer coalescing into myth. Instead, the book's saturated with this desire to gesture toward "it," to somehow get fragmentary words to capture some essential aspect of "the thing," and Myles' genius lies in making the grand gesture that includes the trivial detail and the sublime at once, their juxtaposition underscoring how we are small and made large by connection, paradoxically isolate and dependent.

Non-fiction

Though Myles's primary intention was to be a poet, they have stated that they were also moved by the New Journalism of the sixties and seventies and the art writing tradition by poets of the New York School. In the 1980s, Myles began to publish personal journalism, book reviews, and art reviews. Early columns appeared in the Poetry Project Newsletter; their essay "I Hate Mimeo" called for an end to the mimeograph, which was used to pring that newsletter. Myles's first book, The Irony of the Leash (1978), was produced on the mimeograph machine at St. Mark's Poetry Project. In the 1990s they wrote a monthly column in Paper.

Myles' early book and theater reviews appeared in New York Native, Outweek, and Out, and they were a notable figure on the poetry and queer art scene of the 1980s and 1990s on the Lower East Side. Later, Myles would publish essays and other article in the Village Voice, The Nation, Artforum, Parkett, and Art in America.

In 2006 Myles received an Warhol/Creative Capital grant, which funded their first collection of nonfiction, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). The title essay from this collection, "Iceland," has been described as part travel essay, part personal essay, and part inquiry into the nature of how landscape and writing affect each other.

Fiction

Myles's first short story collection, Chelsea Girls (1994), includes "Bread and Water", the oldest story in the collection and an account of life in the East Village in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Raymond Foye called it "the quintessential memoir of the Lower East Side." In an interview with Michael Hafford, Myles stated that "Bread and Water" was "literally like a copy of my life at that moment." In "Chelsea Girls", the title story, Myles chronicles their time as the assistant to poet James Schuyler in the Chelsea Hotel; their intergenerational exchange has been the subject of scholarship by Dianne Chisholm and José Esteban Muñoz. In a review in The Los Angeles Times, Erika Taylor wrote: "Myles' collection of short stories is so unabashedly solipsistic, so confident in its own self-absorption, that she takes chances and has payoffs few other writers would be willing to risk. . . It would be easy to dismiss "Chelsea Girls" as poetic hot air if Myles weren't so smart and funny."

Myles's second full-length work, Cool for You: a nonfiction novel (2000), catalogs abject institutional spaces of an "insider", in opposition to the male artist as an "outsider". Among these spaces are school, family, and various bad jobs; the extreme insider of the book is Myles's maternal grandmother Nellie Riordan Myles, who spent the last 17 years of her life in a state mental hospital in Massachusetts. Also included in Cool for Yous inventory is an imaginary one—a chapter that describes the Solar System from the perspective of a ten-year-old version of Myles themself, Myles's first foray into fantasy writing. Cool for You received widespread recognition and was reviewed in The New York Times and The Nation. Charles Shipman, in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote: "Although the writing is sometimes too fragmented to follow and occasionally becomes a tad melodramatic (oh, those awful nuns!), Myles has an undeniable gift for capturing the small details and mundane events that shape our lives. She's also capable of writing with tremendous sensitivity, and because she never slips into sentimentality, her tender passages are all the more affecting. . . By the end of "Cool for You" you do feel as though you know Eileen Myles, and you're glad you took the time to listen to her story".

Inferno (A Poet's Novel) (2010) fictionalizes the life of Dante, and Myles stated in an interview with John Oakes that the vernacular language of his Inferno is their "biggest argument for the way I write." Craig Epplin, in The New Inquiry, wrote the book is Myles's attempt at sketching alternative sorts of existence in common. They do so not through simple prescription, but rather by modeling the act of assembly itself". It was awarded a 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. On September 29, 2015, HarperCollins reissued Myles's out-of-print collection Chelsea Girls.

Performance

In 1979 Myles founded the Lost Texans Collective with Elinor Nauen and Barbara McKay. That year the group produced Joan of Arc a spiritual entertainment and would produce Patriarchy, a play in 1980.

Later solo performances include "Leaving New York (1989), Life (1991), and Summer in Russia (1996), which were performed at P.S. 122, Judson Church.

Myles's later plays, Feeling Blue parts 1, 2, and 3, Modern Art, and Our Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, written for Alina Troyano, were all produced at WOW Cafe and P.S. 122.

Since the early eighties Myles has toured and read their own work extensively. In late 1988 they traveled with poet and memoirist Jim Carroll on a tour sponsored by Lila Acheson Wallace. In the nineties Myles toured Germany with Kathy Acker, Lynne Tillman, Richard Hell, and Chris Kraus. Since 1997 Myles has frequently toured with LGBT performance group Sister Spit.

Myles appears on three episodes in the second season of the TV series Transparent in 2015 and in 2024 they appeared in Andrea Luka Zimmerman's film Wayfaring Stranger.

Fellowships, grants, awards

  • Lambda Literary Award, 1996 (Small Press Book Award), 1998 (Lesbian Poetry), 2011 (Lesbian Fiction)
  • Creative Capital Award, 2016
  • Bill Whitehead Award, 2020

Bibliography

Novels

  • Cool for You. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2000.
  • Inferno (A Poet's Novel). New York: OR Books, 2010.

Short story collections

  • Bread and Water. New York: Hanuman Books, 1986.
  • 1969. New York: Hanuman Books, 1989.
  • Chelsea Girls. Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1994. Republished alongside I Must Be Living Twice. Ecco, 2015.
  • Sappho's Boat. Los Angeles: Little Caesar, 1982.
  • a “Working Life”. Grove Press, 2023

Non-fiction

  • The Importance of Being Iceland (art writing). New York: Semiotext(e), MIT Press, 2009.
  • Afterglow (a dog memoir). Grove Press, 2017
  • For Now. Yale University Press, 2020.

Performances

  • Wayfaring Stranger. 2024

Anthologies

  • The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading (co-edited with Liz Kotz). New York: Semiotext(e), MIT Press, 1995.
  • Pathetic Literature (collection). New York: Grove Press, 2022.

Their name appears in the lyrics of the Le Tigre song "Hot Topic."

The second season of the TV series Transparent featured a character based on Myles.

Myles appears in the film Masculinity/Femininity (2014).

See also

  • List of poets portraying sexual relations between women

References

  • "The Rumpus Interview with Poetry Rock Star Eileen Myles", December 2, 2009
  • "An Icelandic Personal Culture: An Interview with Eileen Myles", 3:AM Magazine January 2, 2009
  • Eileen Myles, the elevator, in: Camera Austria International 146 | 2019