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Eileen Myles
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 Cool
For You by
Eileen Myles
Proof that the best
novelists are poets, Myles's Cool for You combines an artist's
interior flood of sensations and a regular citizen's attempt to
piece together the story of her institutionalized grandmother.
Cool for You is too insightful to be lumped with memoirs. (In
fact, it's categorized as a novel.) It's everything Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man is touted as being, but Myles outmuscles,
out-testosterones, and plain out-does sterile Joyce. There's a
vitality here that you're familiar with if you're lucky enough to
have heard and seen Myles read. This book's about institutions of
all sorts--loony bins and Catholic school, summer camp and
college--and an individual's busting free of them. This is a
beautiful book, achingly truthful, funny, wise. I highly recommend
Myles's world. 
 School
of Fish by
Eileen Myles
The school of fish
mentioned in the title poem of this book live at the bottom of the
sea, but are somehow addicted to light. In her ninth book, Eileen
Myles writes about the longing for light, for passion and decency,
in a world diminished by death and dulled by forgetfulness. At the
center of this powerful volume is an essay called "The
Lesbian Poet," which Myles delivered at the Revolutionary
Poetry Symposium at St Mark's Poetry Project in 1994. In this
important, provocative essay Myles claims both male and female
poets among her lesbian forebears.
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This site lists several online texts:
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By Brighde Mullins
Excerpt:
Eileen Myles' poetry emanates immediacy,
inventiveness, inclusiveness. Her role as a teacher, an editor,
and as a candidate in the 1992 Presidential Election have all
demonstrated her unstinting energies. Her levels of energy are
matched by the levels of her concerns, evidenced in her poems of
the city, of making a living, of making notations against chaos.
Artaud has written "the spirit of profound anarchy is at the
root of all poetry" and this anarchic spirit appears in her
animating presence and in her subversive re-invention of existing
forms.
Myles' work presents a shifting persona, but one
that is always responsive, always articulate. In one poem she
states "I'm just a simple Catholic girl" and the
arbitrary difficulties of the life of a simple Catholic girl who
is also unapologetic about her love of women, has granted a
generation of lesbians the permission to use the facts of their
lives in their work. These lines are from her long poem
"Promotional Material:" "We get pushed around. We
don't know how to fight. Or, if we do, we're called bitches. Which
is an angry dog. A bitch in heat. And if you talk about it people
say Oh, you are a feminist--which means you are whiney and out of
date. The other thing that happens if you complain: they think
you're a lesbian. Who's that angry, complaining Lesbian? Ever get
yelled at in the street by a man--You--You--Lesbian. Everyone
laughs. Just the word DYKE is funny. And you ARE a lesbian which
ruins everything..."
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Listen to Myles read her poems
"Sleepless" and "On the Death of Robert
Lowell."
Site includes a short biographical
description.
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From Naropa, by Michelle Albert
Excerpt:
How do politics fit into your writing?
Well I am a political animal. I think my work
became more political instantly when I came out. I was 27, so I
was sort of already in the poetry scene, you know, as a straight
girl. Once I was a poet, and knew that I was a poet, then I felt
more comfortable going ahead and being a lesbian. Because I
already had an identity. My own homophobia, I think, led me to
think that if I was a lesbian first then I would just be a
lesbian. And I wasn't sure where poetry was in the hands of women
and dykes and gay culture. I didn't know what that was. But I had
already begun my poetry education. And it was sort of happening in
a heterosexual scene -- St. Mark's, which is kind of a white
straight scene anyway. The first reading I did, which was love
poems and stuff, could be considered to be a lot of things,
including political...
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Excerpt:
When I think about the permutations in AIDS art
since its beginnings, I'd say we've gone from invisibility to
invisibility. Certainly the first well-known artists to die of
AIDS weren't writing about it in a direct way. Charles
Ludlam or Cookie
Mueller didn't make art "about" AIDS, but instead
became virtual symbols of the plague. Ludlam's name became
synonymous with the campy art culture that vanished as the theater
community was decimated by the disease. As for Cookie, she became
more famous as a writer once she'd died. The expectations for the
terrific novel that she wanted to write ceased to be an issue and
the several collections of her writing that did or would later
exist became fetish objects as much as literary objects. Then her
own deceased image--as a literal corpse, I mean--became canonized
by Nan
Goldin's photograph. In a way the images of these artists
themselves were the original AIDS art. Then David
Wojnarowicz--the center of the next wave--converted his own
immense artistic project into a living political symbol. It's
impossible now to encounter David's work without feeling infused
with his sense of impending doom and his rage at the immovable
fact of his own, approaching death.
And me? Eileen Myles, HIV-negative lesbian, a
poet and a critic who has shared a vivid and close-knit way of
life since the late-70s with a large number of dykes and fags,
mostly artists. For me, the plague was never anything but the most
intimate kind of tragedy. The most shocking thing--until the new
drugs came into use and people who everyone thought would die,
didn't--was that we were in a large loud vacuum with our crisis. I
could go home and attend my 85 year-old uncle's funeral the same
week as Cookie Mueller's and no one in my family understood or
wanted to understand, the intensity of it. Which became a fresh
reason to make that reality my home. I felt bonded to my world by
crisis...
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