Driving and Catastrophe with Eileen Myles

Petrocultures research has instructively foregrounded the centrality of fossil fuels to modern culture, while asking difficult questions of literature as to its lack of a direct engagement with oil. In Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (2014), Stephanie LeMenager asks several times, “why is oil so bad?” One of the provisional answers she gives is that oil is bad “because of the mystified ecological unconscious of modern car culture, which allows for a persistent association of driving with being alive” (80). This article will take its cue from LeMenager‘s coupling of driving and aliveness, but will turn her answer inside out. Rather than mystifying the relationship between driving and being alive, Eileen; Myles’ poetry in the new millennium has explicitly grappled with the way that their own aliveness while driving is burning the planet. In doing so, Myles’ work also confronts the petromasculinity and possessive individualism at the heart of white, masculine American road literature.¹

LeMenager‘s focus on the “the mystified ecological unconscious” is indicative of how petrocultures scholars have framed the relationship between oil and culture. In a much-cited 1992 article from The New Republic, the novelist and critic Amitav; Ghosh wonders about the absence of oil in novels. He asks his readers to “try and imagine a major American writer taking on the Oil Encounter. The idea is literally inconceivable” (30). As others have pointed out, presumably Ghosh wasn’t aware of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (1926–1927), the basis for the 2007 drama There Will be Blood. More recently, in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), Ghosh expands his target from oil to climate change, asking, “what is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction? And what does this tell us about culture writ large and its patterns of evasion?” (11)² Through focusing on the evasion or absence of oil in “serious” culture, petrocultures scholars have come to talk of an “oil unconscious.” Patricia Yaeger proposed periodizing literary epochs by their fuel sources, whether whale oil or gasoline, which would define the “energy unconscious” (306) at work in each epoch.³ Imre Szeman worries, though, that “such a periodization fails to capture […] the almost complete absence of oil as subject matter (direct or allegorical) in the literature written during the era when it is dominant” (324). In foregrounding literature’s evasion of fossil fuels, these scholars provide a quintessentially paranoid reading of petrocultures, a form of attention which, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick put it, “knows some things well and others poorly” (130).⁴

In contrast to the narrative-driven genres of fiction and film, which most petrocultures scholars focus on, Myles writes about driving and oil in short experimental poems and stories that – to use Sarah Ensor's words – put “a playful emphasis on relationality as such” (151). For Ensor, a queer ecopoetics is defined by relationality without a fixed object, as opposed to the environmentalist imperative to protect an already-defined environment, or to consume less. Myles’ poems fit this description as they strive to be open to the process and technologies of composition, rather than seeking to protect any given reality. Indeed, the process of relating, of moving, is the point in Myles’ poetics of flow. This movement also encompasses their relation to gender. As Myles puts it in their reflection on trans* poetics, “My Boy’s Red Hat,” “gender and the self keep turning all the time. I think it’s a kind of danger that moves us. Some people are capable of staying in their castle but for me they just aren’t queer” (177). In versifying the variability of gender and the self through attending to ecological relations, Myles crafts a trans* ecopoetics of flow that can be both playful and dangerous at once.⁵ The dangers that Myles confronts vary throughout their oeuvre, from acts of sexual violence by men in cars in stories such as “Popponesset” and “Violence Against Women” from Chelsea Girls (1994), to climate catastrophe in more recent poetry. Indeed, Myles’ trans* ecopoetics develops through their engagement with both the pleasures and dangers of automobility, so the joy of being a man with a car in “The Lesbian Poet” (1994) leads, in the new millennium, to a confrontation with driving’s complicity with violence against the planet and non-human animals.

This article will focus on Myles’ 2012 book Snowflake/different streets, and in particular the section called “the LA/Driving poems,” where they consistently figure driving as a mode of relation that includes, but is not defined by, directions and goals. By writing with various technologies (including their automobile), Myles models an ecological relationality where there is no outside to environmental catastrophe. Indeed, Myles’ trans* ecopoetics of openness and flow is, it turns out, inseparable from the literal flow of oil and traffic. Rather than seeking to separate poetry from catastrophe in an attempt to preserve the former’s purity, in these poems friendship, longing, mobility, and mourning are encountered in the midst of crisis. This article ends with a discussion of Myles’ short road movie, The Trip (2019), which confronts the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe on the U.S. Mexican border. This film suggests some of the ways that white mobility has been premised on immobilizing black and brown bodies, especially migrants and prisoners. Here trans* connotes the transport of moving across national and carceral boundaries, as well as that between fiction and reality, past and present. Myles’ work across genres and forms of media asks us, ultimately, to live with the contradictions of a poetics that strives for a life and art beyond petromodernity, even if it means driving to get there.

“The LA/Driving poems”

Snowflake/different streets is a small book that is really made up of two even smaller ones bound together and facing each other, so that when finishing Snowflake the reader finds themselves at the end of different streets, and has to turn the book around to read it from the beginning. Myles began teaching at UC San Diego in 2002 and much of the book takes place in California. As they detail in For Now (2019), the university bought them a house as well as a 1999 Ford Ranger (52). Along with their Ford pickup truck, Myles also owned a flip phone with a camera, a product which had recently flooded the market (Myles, e-mail to the author). In Snowflake there is a sequence of twelve, short, numbered poems, which Myles “vaguely” thinks of as “the LA/Driving poems” (different streets 84). These poems “were dictated into a small digital recorder while I drove from San Diego to Los Angeles at twilight then night” (84). As they write in Afterglow (2017), “I like this new idea of talking to the road rather than singing about it. Rather than dangerously writing with a pad on my knee I pick up the slim Gumby-like recorder every once in a while” (55). The LA/Driving Poems make clear the centrality of technology for Myles’ process of composition, as well as the all-pervasiveness of oil. As Stephanie LeMenager puts it, “southern California, with its sunshine and endless opportunities for self-extension via gadgetry, was, for the twentieth century, the location of the Nature of the Modern” (76). For Myles in the twenty-first century, modern nature includes crafting a cyborg poetry that “is 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” (“Poetics Statement”). The automobile, the cell phone, and the voice recorder are the most important technologies for Myles’ knowing in this book. The particular assemblage of these poems is tenuous and temporary, though, as Myles’ practice of recording their voice while driving “really only worked for one week” (qtd. in Campbell 158).

In the poem “#8 Car Camera” from the sequence, it becomes clear how both the technologies of photography and driving dramatize the profound strangeness of having an open direction. Maggie Nelson has written of earlier poems where Myles regularly posits their “speaker as a camera and the poem itself as a snapshot or collection of snapshots” (197). This later poem, though, distrusts the camera’s aim:

my bullet regular

my two-fisted slim little

gun of a man

now to touch a button

and turn the entire outside of my

car into a camera

so that everything that’s going

on out there could be coming in

could be held and recorded

cause I don’t want to point the camera

I want it to be as open as I am

what’s moving be the thing

that holds it all

I think that dot is me

(Snowflake 34)

Here movement is “the thing/that holds it all,” and therefore the self cannot but be a “dot.” Driving is the motor of the poet’s aliveness in this poem, though being a “gun of a man” appears both exciting and ominous. Rather than hewing to the “gun” of their automobile, Myles aspires to use recording technology, along with the car, to create a trans* poetic where the poet is themselves part of an ecological flow, rather than solidifying a point of view. The line “I don’t want to point the camera” harks back to the “gun” of the poem’s opening, suggesting the violence implicit in a certain kind of directionality.⁶ As Myles put it in an interview with Kaveh Akbar, “I am really interested in language that works like a camera, following the flow of these things rather than working one angle.” In this poetic vision the camera functions as though there were no photographer. As Rosa Campbell points out, “#8 Car Camera” retools “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of the poet as a ‘transparent eyeball,’ a transcendent channel for sensory experience” (160). Whereas Emerson’s poet becomes “nothing” through vanishing into “Universal Being” (qtd. in Campbell 160), Myles’ poet remains a particular “dot” and is more interested in the transitivity of relating to “everything” than in being “nothing” (Campbell 160).

Myles posted a driving photo to their Instagram account on March 2, 2021 that illustrates the tension between pointedness and flow, which “#8 Car Camera” turns into poetry. It is a blurry photo apparently taken while leaving their second home in Marfa, Texas at dusk, reminiscent of how “#8” ends with “the light blue but as we know/darkening sky” (35). In the photo light from the dotted streetlights extends and blurs into that of the setting sun, while also reflecting across the windshield and the hood of the car. It is as if the car is part of a directionality determined by light, and the taking of the photo itself, rather than the other way around. These lights carrying the car forward down the slim road are like Myles’ short lines stretching down the page. As Myles writes of their poetic line in “The Lesbian Poet,” “in the poem you’re turning around. The flickering lights of the fading lines re-erupting one quarter inch down, unpredictable, rude” (School of Fish 126). Scrolling though Myles’ Instagram feed, many of their photos are blurry or taken from strange angles and are in this way “unpredictable.” Such photos perform their occasional nature, thereby becoming – like Myles’ poetry – part of a larger experience of flow. A flow where the camera, like the poet in their car, is quite literally a “dot” on a digital map.

Figure 1. Eileen.myles Instagram posting from March 2, 2021.

Rather than conceiving of the poet as an autonomous subject realizing their will through technology, Myles consciously allows technology to be part of the process of composing both writing and the self. This practice results in cyborg poems in Donna J. Haraway‘s sense of the term, where “the machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our process, an aspect of our embodiment” (180). In “#8 Car Camera,” touching a button turns the whole car into a camera, which is “as open as I am.” The car thereby becomes melded with other technologies such as the cell phone and the voice recorder, along with the poet, to create a cyborg that exceeds human intention. This excess of intentionality is evident in the perplexed pleasure of composition inscribed in the opening of the book’s first poem, “Transitions”:

sometimes

I’m driving

and I pressed

the button

to see who

called &

suddenly I’m

taking pictures.

(Snowflake 1)

The poem begins – “sometimes” – in the midst of a recurrent, unintentional, occurrence formed by technology. Toward the end of the poem there’s the question, “what’s not technology/what’s not seeing” (6)? The mobile flip phone and the car become confounded here, not only with each other, but with the poem itself, as all are technologies for seeing. The pictures are “Big dark/ones” just as the night is “black,” yet “there’s all/these lights,” not least from other cars, each seeing in its own way (1–2). These varieties of vision and duration through the darkness (“I’ve/driven very /far”) lead to the declaration “I’m strong” (2). It is a declaration borne through experiencing objects as (unintentionally) transitional, and the insight that each car carries such variousness within it. The strength found through driving is as precarious as the constellation of technologies assembling this poem.

Indeed, in “#6 (Eileen …)” the persona of “Eileen Myles” is as precarious as poetry:

here is wide open sky

and I forgot this

and I forgot that

and in my freedom

I forget why I leave

Eileen,

I leave

my name.

(32)

There is a profound ambiguity in these final lines, where leaving one’s name is both an act of inscription and an act of departure. Indeed, this moment is reminiscent of how the character Eileen Myles writes their name in the sand on the beach with their toe, and then rubs it out, after being gangraped in the story “Popponesset” in Chelsea Girls. The catastrophes left behind in Chelsea Girls thereby become part of the development of, Myles’ poetics of flow, creating an openness that leaves room for others to enter and experience their work. As they put it in For Now:

And my whole way of doing this therefore is laden with the ambition for the product to have a lot of world in it, be a little humble messy and dirty, so that people can enter like they walk into a building, a public building that is there since once I’m done it’s theirs. I vanish into it first but then you do too. (73)

To vanish into the poem, then, is also to inhabit it fully. As readers we are invited to come in and move around in a space made by “Eileen Myles,” but Eileen also has to vanish to give the reader room to experience the poem from their own vantage. This is another aspect of Myles’ trans* ecopoetics, where driving past oneself, becoming a dot, taking a photo unintentionally, vanishing and forgetting, all make room for the reader as well as the world outside the poem.

In the second of the LA/Driving poems the prosody of driving and poetry become one:

I count this road

I read that chain where you sit down

is easier fat than

fast food

what do you know red trucks with their hiccup

front

grant wood roads

I know you’re not a microphone

I know you’re god

I know what catches me & stops me all the time

and fills the rest

and fills the bill

and swells

and comes down

(Snowflake 27–28)

The poet addresses the device onto which they are recording the poem: “I know you’re god/I know what catches me & stops me all the time.” Technology here becomes revelatory, but also functions like a speed trap, both catching and stopping the poet. Here is another kind of presence through vanishing: the technology of the poem causes it to stop, but this stopping “fills the rest” at the end of the line as well as at the poem’s end. When the poem finally “comes down” it is as though it has survived the travail of hiccups, fast food, and Grant Wood, with the latter’s suggestion of death and catastrophe.⁷

While the poet associates their authorial powers with driving in Snowflake/different streets, they do not unabashedly vaunt automobility. Indeed, the poet remains aware of the violence associated with drivers, and their necessary displacement of others. Even more poignantly, drivers displace themselves, since a world full of drivers leads to stalled traffic, the subject of the short poem “Observance”:

the thing

about Los Angeles

the way

the cars

pile up

when you

get close

you’d think

they had

something

really good

in there

(14)

Of course, Los Angeles is itself full of cars and traffic. Is there something “really good/in there,” or is “the thing” at the heart of L.A. a compulsive and destructive automobility? The poet is themselves driving, and so this wry reflection on L.A. traffic is not moralistic, but perhaps tragicomic, with the extra space between the two-word lines making them look like piled-up cars. What Ian C. Davidson writes of “Transitions” is also true of “Observance,” that “inside and outside become part of the same experience, and we never forget that the speaking ‘I’ of the poem is navigating a metal projectile at speed down the road” (554). This inside/outside perspective allows, as we are about to see, for a reflexive critique of the poet’s complicity with Californian automobility.

In “#9 Destroying Us” and “#10 Ball,” the poet reckons with petroleum as the basis for their ability to drive their car, and to compose poems, while its overuse threatens planetary destruction.

#9 Destroying Us

I don’t mean to romanticize

this thing that’s destroying

us all

I would happily drive

more than two hours

no

I would drive …

romanticize this thing

that’s destroying us

I would drive

a couple of hours

for friendship.

(Snowflake 36)

Here an awareness of climate catastrophe is introduced into a series of driving poems that have otherwise played upon a standard theme of automobile aesthetics, namely the nature of human agency in relation to mechanical technologies. Suddenly the poet seems ashamed for reveling in the kinds of aesthetic experiences provided for by such technologies. Rather, though, than seeking to disengage from the sense of aliveness that the car provides this series of poems, “#9” repeats the phrase “romanticize this thing,” thereby performing the compulsion to “drive/a couple of hours/for friendship.”

These poems create an awareness of the way oil is fundamental to getting around modern America, and fundamental to its literature as well. Yet instead of seeking to unveil the reality of oil and climate catastrophe, these poems assume their constitutive presence.

#10 Ball

Is there anything about oil we don’t

know already

like we’re driving on our own limited past

something that’s ancient like the history of

this ball we’re driving these cars on

the fluid of everything and everybody

that ever was here

we’re draining that

to just get around

and it’s nice that

I could feel around in

the dark to say

these things

to touch a button

to make it light

and then

go out

(Snowflake 37)

The opening of this poem appears to be responding to an imperative to know more about oil. Perhaps this imperative is in response to climate change deniers, and is in effect asking, what more do you need to know? But these opening lines might also be providing a criticism of the demand for more knowledge and representations of oil – the same demand that is made by petrocultures scholars. In “#10 Ball” the poet already knows everything about oil, but is nevertheless compelled to drive, and here this driving appears as the occasion for the poem. Oil allows the poet to “say/these things” at the “touch [of] a button.” This facility appears absurdly destructive, though, since “we’re driving these cars on/the fluid of everything and everybody/that ever was.” This fluid, furthermore, is akin to the flow of Myles’ poetry writ large, suggesting that their poetics of flow – “to be born and live as variously as possible” (256), as Frank O’Hara put it – is predicated on fossil fuel extraction. Is there a tinge of fatalistic romanticism here? This poem seems to prove LeMenager‘s point that “liveness, as in seeming to be alive, now relies heavily upon oil” (6). Yet, the poet’s knowledge of the imbrication of liveness with oil doesn’t preclude wonder: “make it light”! The occasion of the poem not only relies on oil, “the fluid of everything and everybody/that ever was,” but is also, like oil, itself ephemeral, fleeting. It is an occasional poem. The poet’s wonder is shot through, though, with resentment toward our dependance on petroleum, as in the poem “the nervous entertainment” from different streets:

If I say

thank you

at one

more gas

station

I’m going to start

believing oil

is god

(20)

Myles’ oil poems are unlikely to satisfy readers looking for a trenchant critique of petromodernity. While these poems reflect on, and even lament, the imbrication of their composition with fossil fuels, “#10 Ball” suggests that ultimately “it’s nice” to be able to write in this way. Indeed, Myles’ occasional oil poems foreground their own smallness in ways that are cute, in Sianne Ngai‘s sense of the term. These poems can at once display aggression to oil and a desire to protect their own smallness. It is as though poems needs protection just as the earth does, which is figured as a “ball” that humans are irresponsibly playing with as though it were a toy., Ngai argues that “cuteness might be explicitly mobilized by the poetic avant-garde as a meditation on its own restricted agency” (97). The cute poem cannot save the world, which itself becomes cute by virtue of its fragility. Just as Earth might be used as a toy, the upside-down halves and small size of Snowflake/different streets suggest that its readers must play with it in order to read both sides. Rather than performing a heroic confrontation with oil, these poems attest to the everyday frustration of having to depend upon it.

In a later poem in Snowflake entitled “More Oil,” driving causes the death of a quintessentially cute animal, which elicits the poet’s aggression toward automobility:

he was dead

and not a particular

rabbit

his legs crossed

like he was asleep

and I hate us

I hate our roads

(76)

As in “#9,” the consequences of mass automobility are collective, but while in that poem driving seems like a form of self-harm, in “More Oil” cars are responsible for killing a rabbit. In both poems the poet stays in their car, while in “More Oil” they seem to have internalized the mechanics of driving: “I don’t run/I just pull over/listening to the fossil/fuel churning/in my guts” (78). Myles’ poetry is full of coffee, as suggested by the cover image to this special issue, so it is easy to hear a cute analogy here between the petroleum that fuels cars, and the caffeine fueling many of Myles’ poems. If this analogy is cute, there is also something frighteningly uncanny about the similarity between the “guts” fueling the poet, the car, and those of the dead rabbit.

If driving is quite literally a dead end, then so are individual responses to climate change. The book’s subsequent poem, “D.H.,” dramatizes how such individual responses themselves appear cute in relation to the immensity of the problem.

Politically speaking

look at this

a word at a time

on my knee

looking forward to a picnic

with my friends

in the afternoon

in their car

but no the climate is such

that I never

arrive

stayed on the stair

master

one more time

I’m depressed

all my life

enraged the man behind

me as we plow

into the brite gray lite

(Snowflake 80–82)

In Myles’ poetics of flow, “the climate is such” that we “never/arrive.” Unlike, though, Kerouac‘s On the Road (1957) and a host of other more or less romantic representations of driving in American culture, here there is no joy to the endless journey. Yet staying at home is just as depressing, as not going for a picnic with friends seems unable to prevent the earth from burning. This predicament between endless movement and meaningless standstill is encapsulated in the image of the stairmaster, which works like the poem itself, where pushing down the next step is literally depressing. What is it that the poet has escaped? It seems they have been a plodding driver, ever enraging the man behind them. But escaping road rage does not prevent them from “burning what’s left/of the earth/never meeting/anyone” (82).

Rather than seeking to forever stave off the same trauma of catastrophe, Myles’ driving poems live with it as a part-object that they continually relate to. In this way their poems are both paranoid and reparative, to use Sedgwick‘s dichotomy. While these poems put “a playful emphasis on relationality as such” (Esnor 151), they also show how the interrelation of poetry, oil, and driving, leaves no one’s hands clean. Playing with oil, which comes from dead life, also leads to death. These poems powerfully illustrate how driving and being alive have indeed become inseparable, but they also show how cars are part of killing, rather than living. The poet cannot simply opt-out of this predicament, though. To “enter the history/of intellectuals/who escaped that” (Snowflake 81) offers loneliness rather than solace, and does not mitigate the earth’s burning. While these poems speak to a longing to avoid the trauma of climate catastrophe, they ultimately invite us to live with that catastrophe as a constitutive part of both experience and poetry.

The Trip

Myles has also made a short road trip movie, The Trip (2019), which foregrounds the politics of mobility. In this film, Myles confronts migration policy on the U.S. Mexican border, as well as mass incarceration in U.S. prisons, suggesting how white mobility is predicated on immobilizing the dispossessed. Trans* takes on another valence here, of moving across national and carceral boundaries, as well as the distinction between fantasy and reality. Myles has always had an interest in poets’ movies, and as far back as 1977 they organized the recording of themselves and their friends reading poetry while on speed in a laundromat in SoHo.⁸ They write that “I wanted to make films, always did and poetry was a default position” (Now 43). On the heels of the success of Joey Soloway’s series Transparent (2014–2019), where Myles appears, and I Love Dick (2016–2017) for Amazon Studios, Myles began work on their own Chelsea Girls for Amazon, but the project later fell through. In the wake of this setback, they teamed with David Fenster to make The Trip, a seventeen-minute-long road movie, where, Myles drives their Ford Ranger from Marfa to Alpine, Texas with their dog Honey, as well as four papier-mâché puppets they created as a child, as passengers.

Inspired by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s 1959 film; Pull My Daisy, with voiceover by Jack Kerouac, The Trip is likewise associative, if not rambling, with non-diegetic voiceover provided by Myles. Another important predecessor is Leslie and O’Hara’s; The Last Clean Shirt (1964), which Myles has made clear was central to their poetic development after moving to New York City in 1974. In a 2000 interview with Frances Richard for Provincetown Arts, they describe the effect of first seeing O’Hara and Leslie’s film:

It was kind of like yippee! and kind of like sorrow, and it was profound and excited in that way that O’Hara’s voice just shifts and shifts and shifts and keeps taking in everything and letting it out. When I saw that movie I thought, “That’s it.” That is, in the most classic sense, who O’Hara was, even what the New York School was. The poet was like this open car in the middle of the century, at some peak moments just saying, “Yes!” and catching the shape—moving through it all in a very excited way. People who romanticize and imitate O’Hara mistakenly think that abundance gets to be what it’s about—that mid-century excess and heroism and triumph, which it isn’t.

History has continued. It’s the ‘70s and the ‘80s and the feeling changes.

(“Never Real” 28)

The flow of Myles’ work, their “taking in everything and letting it out,” found inspiration and affirmation in Leslie and O’Hara‘s road movie. For Myles this mid-century exuberance has changed into something else, though, after the 1973 oil shock, and post-Fordist economic restructuring. What Myles does inherit from O’Hara‘s poetics (among other things) is an ethos of inclusion, evident in The Trip’s chatty excitement. Furthermore, as Maggie Nelson has made clear, Myles turned this inclusiveness into a feminist poetics of “tenacity” (208):

In the face of thwarted desire or crippling shame, [The Last Clean Shirt] says, Get back in the convertible and start looking around. Feel free to babble to your copilot. Don’t be afraid of speech, be it your own or that of others. To the poem on the page, it says Keep moving, but unlike [Charles] Olson’s demand that “one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!”, it isn’t bossy. Instead it counsels, It’s OK to move in a circle, to drive around the block, to cruise. It’s OK just to chart what’s coming down the river. And, as Myles crucially adds in “The Poet”: Don’t be afraid to be feminine. (208)

It is now clear – fifteen years after the publication of Nelson‘s book – that Myles also isn’t afraid to be trans. Indeed, their trans* relationship to cars was already apparent in “The Lesbian Poet,” their 1994 talk at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, where they recall:

Last summer I was standing alone on a hill with my dog and a car as an amazing shower of meteorites flash flash has stained the sky orange. It was so sensational and I was utterly alone with my animal. I knew I was a man. It was utterly clear, there was no thing of woman at all. I was standing in nature alone, this guy. It was a terrifically human feeling. Alone. Completely full. (School of Fish 124-125)

Being a driver here means being a man instead of a woman, as part of a lineage of other masculine poet-drivers, including Robert Creeley and Gertrude Stein.

While The Last Clean Shirt engages with struggles over mobility during the 1960s Civil Rights movement, The Trip, for its part, confronts the prison industrial complex, and more specifically, U.S. immigration policy at the Mexican border which, as the most prominent puppet Casper tells us, is “approximately 88 miles” from Alpine (13:39). Myles’ poem “December 16,” which is both geographically and thematically related to The Trip, begins: “driving/through Tor/nillo &/I feel/all the/children/we can’t/see/in his/America” (180). Tornillo, Texas is a border town, 160 miles northwest of Marfa by car, where U.S. officials detained thousands of migrant children, reaching a crescendo during Donald Trump’s presidency. “December 16” – which likewise includes Myles’ puppets – makes apparent how driving and white mobility call forth unseen and immobilized brown and black bodies in The Trip as well. The most prominent puppet in the movie is Casper the ghost, who is on his way to study philosophy at Sul Ross State University. When Myles’ carload of puppets and dog get to campus, Casper makes a speech on the white steps of the university, which is named for a confederate general: “I make common cause now with the slaves of the world, prisoners of our security state, and most abundantly, most locally today, America’s prisoners of war, not immigrants, illegals, aliens, but refugees, children, women, and men in cages and jails not far from here. A multitude, less visible than a ghost, more silent than a puppet (14:25).” Casper invokes here the victims of a white mobility which, since the Atlantic slave trade, has been predicated on immobilizing black and brown bodies. This point was underscored at the movie’s New York City premiere at the Metrograph in August 2019, where Myles paired The Trip with the screening of the 1973 black power action movie, The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Myles hadn’t seen the latter film before the screening, but clearly sought to create an association between Black Lives Matter and their own film (Horkley).

Figure 2. Stills from The Trip (2019) directed by Eileen Myles.

Figure 3. Stills from The Trip (2019) directed by Eileen Myles.

The Trip’s excavating of the ghosts of white supremacy is part and parcel of Myles literally excavating their childhood ghosts; aside from Casper the ghost, there is the puppet Oscar, who is based on Myles’ dead father, and at one point Myles talks with the puppets about taking them on a trip to Buenos Aires to meet César Aira, author of Ghosts (1990). Having their puppets as passengers gives Myles a technology to think with, similar to the role of recording devices in Snowflake/different streets. Aside from four puppets, The Trip also features a papier-mâché crocodile – “Crocky” – who is voiced by John Ashbery singing portions of “Old Man River,” the 1927 showtune narrated from the perspective of a black stevedore on the Mississippi (For Now 69). Crocky begins singing as Myles drives by the local jail in Marfa, where the theme of incarceration is introduced (2:07). Later in the film they enter Alpine after driving under a train carrying oil tanks, and Crocky has his second cameo, stating – after Myles has made a squeaking noise – that “I would like a little oil (10:07)” It is the only explicit mention of oil in the film, which nevertheless ends in Sul Ross’ parking lot.

The zaniness of The Trip melds the lament over toil in “Old Man River” and the politics of incarceration – the puppets have themselves been stuck in a basket for sixty years – with a poetics of inclusion that is made possible by automobility. Ngai writes that the category of the zany is “explicitly about [the] politically ambiguous intersection between cultural and occupational performance, acting and service, playing and laboring” (182). The Trip becomes zany by playfully performing the strenuous work of bringing the reality of incarcerated and enslaved labor to political consciousness. Unfree labor is thereby another ghost in the film, which the fictive freedoms of automobility rely upon. Indeed, the U.S.-Mexican border looms as a potential limit to automobility’s freedom of movement, if not for Myles themself, then for many others. The film ends with Casper declaring, “abolish all of it, the borders and the jails and the police state. Open the door, R.I.P., not ‘rest in peace’ but abolish the racist, imperialist, patriarchy. Abolish it! Abolish it!” (15:37) Casper repeats the phrase “abolish it” several times, until it begins to sound like he is saying, “a ball of shit” (15:53) echoing the “ball” of “#10 Ball.”

The film’s use of a puppet ghost to confront borders between unfree labor and free mobility accords with Haraway‘s conception of the cyborg body where “we are responsible for boundaries; we are they” (180). The zany cyborg body of The Trip cruises between serious political polemic and flippancy, a movement which is facilitated by driving. This cruising, furthermore, is an instance of what Eliza Steinbock has identified as a trans* cinematic aesthetic where a “shimmering boundary refuses to settle embodied or cinematic images into the diction of true or false, fantasy or actuality” (17). It is on this shimmering boundary that a ghost seeking to study philosophy becomes a political soapbox. Such boundaries accord with Deborah Clarke‘s description of “automotive citizenship [which] operates in borderlands of class, race, and geography, eliding the divisions between public and private, between reality and imagination” (190). In Myles’ borderlands, past, present, and future speak to each other through a road trip between small towns in Texas that provides a kind of psychogeography of whiteness. One might be tempted to call The Trip uncanny, but that would suggest a return of the repressed. As with the oil in Snowflake/different streets, The Trip wears its shimmering boundaries on its sleeve. Insofar as the film is uncanny, it is an uncanniness under the star of camp, where an avowedly political, experimental, Myles, uses the unrealized film of Chelsea Girls to connect personal trauma with the systematic dispossession of migrants and prisoners.

Conclusion

In For Now, Myles discusses the 2017 sale of their manuscript archives to Yale’s Beinecke Library. This archive, while comprising 108 linear feet of material, did not include original final copies of all their poems, which they had stored in a milk crate, nor a bin of valuable photographs, because these materials went missing. Myles narrates at length the various scenarios that might have led to the disappearance of the milk crate and bin of photos, materials which one archivist refers to as “the gusher” (57), as though they were an oil well. The first, and perhaps most convincing, scenario that Myles describes is that the material was moved out of the unlocked covered bed of their truck one night by someone looking for a place to sleep or do drugs or have sex:

I have one version of reality in which I parked the truck on 11^th Street when [my girlfriend and I] came home from Montana. We definitely unloaded outside her apartment first but I think the box remained in the cab and also a big plastic bin of photographs. I thought who would steal this. And I also remember coming to the truck to move it that morning, some morning and the shock of its cab being empty. I don’t know if this is true. You know when something terrible happens and you stand there in the wah-wah like the world keeps changing shapes because you can’t believe it’s gone. Is this a memory or a sensation of loss. A radiant hole? (54)

While For Now narrates the loss of Myles’ manuscript material as a personal tragedy, as we have seen in Snowflake/different streets, trucks and oil cannot provide for stable forms of self-possession in Myles’ poetics. Indeed, here their truck becomes its own kind of “shimmering boundary,” making apparent the “wah-wah” of the world beyond individual intentionality.

In Snowflake/different streets the seeming self-possession of the poet-driver trope is revealed to be a cyborg assemblage of machines, petroleum, and human affections. In confronting environmental destruction, Myles crafts a trans* ecopoetics that bears witness to a Californian culture of automobility where “oil is god,” while in The Trip, the poet’s zany driving leads to a pointed protest against the lack of free mobility for migrants and incarcerated people. In their later work, the poet’s own mobility, in short, is revealed as compromised, while they continue to assert the rights of mobility for those to whom it has been denied. When the automobile is part of writing the poem, as in Snowflake/different streets, what is revealed is not so much poetic self-possession, but authorial diffusion. As, Myles makes clear, their writing persona is itself a fiction anyway: “What I mean is that if the puppets are fiction and so is my dog then I can be fiction too. For one brief hairy moment it’s not ‘my writing’ cause I’m not real, I’m alive. In my writing!” (71). Here liveness invigorates a writing disappearing the self, rather than seeking to perpetuate it. Auto-fiction is, indeed, “the horizon of the practice [of writing]. That out there. And even if the subject is ‘me’ it still feels that way. I’m gone. Necessarily” (67). Driving to unwrite the self of petromodernity, the fiction of “Eileen Myles” can be fueled by oil, but not for love of it.

Acknowledgments

I began writing this article while working at the University of Gothenburg’s Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion (LIR), where I was supported by funding from the Swedish Research Council. I am grateful for feedback I received on previous incarnations of this article at the “Eileen Myles Now” panel that I organized at the American Literature Association’s 2021 annual conference in Boston, at LIR’s research seminar that same year, at the symposium on “Poetry, Place, Movement” organized by the Uppsala Travel Writing Seminar (RELS) and the English Department at Uppsala University in 2022, and at the panel I organized on “Automotive Aesthetics” at the Petrocultures 2022: Transformations conference in Stavanger, Norway. Brian Glavey and Jack Parlett’s feedback also helped me hone my argument. Thank you to David Fenster and Eileen Myles for permission to use stills from The Trip and to Eileen Myles for permission to include their driving photo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vetenskapsrådet [2018-01552].

Notes

¹ On petromasculinity see Cara Daggett, “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies vol. 47, no. 1 (2018): 25–44. On possessive individualism and American automobility see Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America, U of Chicago P, 2009, and Ann; Brigham, American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film, U of Virginia P, 2015.

² Ghosh allows that poetry “has long had an intimate relationship with climatic events,” such as those which characterize climate change (26).

³ It is worth noting that Fredric Jameson warned, in The Political Unconscious, of “the sterility of such classificatory procedures, which may always, it seems to me, be taken as symptoms and indices of the repression of a more genuinely dialectical or historical practice of cultural analysis” (79). Jameson also critiques the “vulgar materialism” (68) that Yaeger‘s classification relies upon as it would “reify its social ground” (67). Yaeger addresses this difficulty in her piece’s sole footnote.

⁴ Szeman meets this critique head-on in his chapter, “Towards a Critical Theory of Energy,” where he writes that “energy is not just another topic to animate the kind of critical paranoia challenged by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, which depends ‘on an infinite reservoir of naïveté in those who make up the audience for these unveilings’ (141). In truth, what the emergence of energy in the field of the human sciences demands is not just a slight amelioration of critical vocabularies, a nip-and-tuck addition of energy to the discourses we already have, but a wholesale refashioning of these vocabularies and their presumed objects of study” (29). Rather than confront the critical limits of paranoid reading, Szeman doubles down here, in effect asking us to become even more paranoid given the gravity of his object of study.

⁵ I am using the term “trans*” in the sense that Jack Halberstam does in his book with the same title, as signifying “a politics of transitivity” that “puts pressure on all modes of gendered embodiment and refuses to choose between the identarian and contingent forms of trans identity” (xiii).

⁶ The gun in “#8 Car Camera” can usefully be compared to the gun in “Road Buddy” from Skies (189–190).

⁷ See Grant Wood’s 1935 painting “Death on the Ridge Road.” I am indebted to Ian C. Davidson‘s “Mobilities of Form” for making explicit this reference.

⁸ See Kane 188–190.