Class, Crisis, and the Commons in Eileen Myles’ Late Work

Twenty-four years after running for President of the United States, on a platform of combating the AIDS epidemic and providing housing for all, Eileen Myles wrote an “Acceptance Speech.” It is partly – but only partly – a joke. Staged on a “beautiful rapturous sunny day in New York” (114), Myles poses as the President-Elect of the 2016 national election, a position later reserved in reality by Donald Trump, and implores their imagined electorate “to turn around, to look back and look at all that we’ve won” (114). Myles admits that they “may be getting ahead” of themselves, and that they may also be the only President to have eaten at the Bowery Mission and devoured “very rubbery, very chewy chicken” with the homeless, as well as the only President to identify as a “dyke” (114). They call for a New Deal-style program of radical redistribution of resources: multiplying the National Endowment of the Arts by tenfold, the refunding of the CETA Employment of Artists which federally employed more than 10,000 artists between 1974 and 1981, and the opening up of that “metonym,” The White House, to veterans of the “pointless wars” of Iraq and Afghanistan (114).

It is difficult to see the invitation to “look back” on the victory of progressive politics in the United States, particularly from the vantage point of 2016, as anything other than ironic or profoundly misjudged. However, “Acceptance Speech” is a contradictory and lyrical text that defies easy categorization; it refuses to be, or to be only, a melancholic lament for progressive programs articulated through the cool detachment implicit in a tone of mock-triumph and humorous ambivalence. One summative reading might be: the national political battles have been lost, and instead, against those losses, we take up the call for “an art in America” (114). Myles, however, has consistently refused to acknowledge this as a retreat from forms of political commitment, and in an interview centered on “Acceptance Speech,” they defended “poetry [as] vastly political” and “as much a multiple as people and languages are … Even a poet who resists the idea that their work is political, that’s their politics” (qtd. in; Satran). Indeed, beyond the hyperbolic historical revisionism of its ostensible premise, “Acceptance Speech” performs a sincere ideological gesture: by self-consciously repurposing the epideictic rhetoric of shared enterprise through collective pronouns and “yes-we-can” positivism that characterized the Obama presidential campaign, Myles confronts the class inequalities and structural violence that constituted the dismal decade that began with the 2008 financial crisis and the promise, and ultimate failures, of the Occupy movement.

This essay frames an understanding of Myles’ late political poetry within the context of grassroots organization, collective mobilization at a local and global level, and the economic and cultural conflicts over what constitutes a “commons” in the United States over the last decade. Focusing on the 2018 publication of the Evolution collection, but also considering Myles’ writing on the planned reconstruction of East River Park on the Lower East Side, I argue that the poet’s repeatedly lyricized calls to collectively “look back,” to turn away, and to turn to, collective victories and scenes of crisis, represent a form of political commitment that offers a means of rethinking the American lyric poem today. Late twentieth-century criticism about the lyric address has tended to concentrate above all on the expressive possibilities of the poet’s use of “I,” focusing on lyricism’s inherently subjective mode and its separation from a social world. For James D. Fernández, address is “essentially antihistorical” and a “trope of detachment” (Fernández 7–8). Natalie Pollard has characterized this position on address as understanding it as “an exceptional – and exceptionally asocial – act: saying you turns I aside from whatever real occurrence is taking place, to a primarily verbal world, of subjectivity, of imagination” (Pollard 4). While Myles’ poetry repeatedly calls attention to the distances between speaker and addressee and the latent ambiguity of their identities, their late poetry deals with an exceptionally social speech-act model that imagines the lyric as closely and intimately tied to expressions of political commitment and organization. This can be recognized not only in the tangible political subject matter of the poems in Evolution, such as those that deal directly with the legacies of the Occupy movement or Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, or their declaration on historical land rights on the island of Manhattan, but also in their “sharing” of extensive social media posts that combine poetic expression, hand-sketched and digital drawings, photographs of New York transformed by civic planning, and organizational texts on local protests and demonstrations. In this way, I argue, Myles foregrounds their writing on social media, and specifically the Instagram post, as an extension of their poetics insofar as both constitute an address to an absent other, and both rehearse the act of writing (or speaking) in an operative present. While the Instagram post necessarily implies the identity of a speaker in a way that feels more confidently determined than in the lyric poem, both ask us to think about and to ultimately differentiate between the lyric’s address and Myles’ address. This article will consider these different forms of texts together, and focus on how Myles’ representation of class politics can be understood as a contestation with the new enclosures of globalized capital and resource extraction.

In the poem “The City (for Stephen Boyer),” which reflects on the Occupy movement as an international form of collective mobilization against austerity and the wealthiest “1%” of the global elite, Myles transitions from conditions of possibility to profound disillusionment:

occupy invented the cityat nightall its empty wares are everywhere (44)

[…]occupy ruined everyis gonethe meat truckscry[.] (46)

Throughout Myles’ poetry, cities are “invented” and destroyed, broken down and rebuilt. They decay and reform. Cities, and especially the city of New York, are for Myles co-created by the material architectures and topographies that constitute them, while also made by those who represent the city in their art. For the poet, who spoke in support of the Occupy movement as part of the lesbian-feminist collective Sister Spit in May 2012, the legacies of what began with Occupy Wall Street in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011 remain multivalent and contradictory. For the speaker of “The City,” the Occupy protests, or the reimagining of global democracy that drove them, create totalizing models for envisioning the city as a space of economic justice while also being responsible for the dystopian disintegration of the whole urban environment. Occupy, for Myles, seemingly both invented and ruined New York City. The sonic proximity of useless “empty wares” and “everywhere” presents a material problem of sold articles on the street, perhaps recalling the “cities within cities” of the Occupy sites, where libraries and makeshift stands distributing food and resources provided for the protestors and maintained the occupation. These wares are now emptied out, and lost, amidst the general malaise of “the big machine” that haunts the city (46). However, it also seems plausible that the “empty wares” represent less the decay or dystopic built environment than a site of possibility, as the objects or ideas that cannot be made useful in the capitalist city: that waste, far from being only discarded or eliminated, is generative. Occupy might have proved to have failed in its stated aims, but how can we know if that failure was not useful in unforeseen, and unforeseeable, ways?

“Poetry will always be anti-capitalist because it’s waste, and that’s what we love about it,” Myles reflects in a 2017 interview. “It’s about looking for things,” they continue, “that don’t have to have a direct use” (qtd. in Fitzgerald). Sharing, then, or recognizing value in what’s thrown away because it’s thrown away, or recuperating the detritus of the street – and indeed the “empty wares” of the Occupy movement – takes on an important function in Myles’ poetic responses to writing at a time of economic crisis. In summer 1999, Myles wrote on Sal Randolph’s Free Show exhibition, in which twenty-five participants, working across visual art, poetry, and prose, were each invited to contribute a piece of work, and then that autumn visitors were invited to attend and were free to take what they wanted. The exhibition might have vanished in moments, or lasted for months if the visitors were generous and wished it to go on running against their self-interest. Myles argued that:

People who learned useless skills in an abundant economy, that was distributed differently than it is now, and now are competitively or gently trying to stuff themselves into the shrinking number of spots on bookshelves, screening rooms and walls. Potentially a lot of art is waste, wasted labor, wasted intellection, and of course mountains and mountains of stuff gets made—so give it away. Always, the artist seeks new ways to distribute. (“Free Show”)

This precedent of “giving away” and of seeking new ways to distribute is responsive to the nature of the waste that comes with artistic production, insofar as the work refuses to be productive in its use-value to the economy. The emphasis on alternative models of distribution, and of bringing others directly into the making and meaning of a work, is itself a committed practice of sharing in a political sense. It is unclear if the spectral space of “The City,” which has now receded and “gone,” is to be lamented or praised, but the weeping of the “meat trucks” calls attention to the ongoing suffering engendered by an all-hours market economy. In a later strophe, the labored alliteration draws attention to the spectacle of self-decay and degeneration:

capitalism gnawing on its bone its bloodyblazing emptybone its pornyplastic bone[.] (46)

These seedy images of the capitalist economy eating itself jars with the embodied contradictions of its contorted skeletal shape: it both blazes and is empty, while the combined effect of suggested phallic simulation in “porny/plastic bone” and the tight tacking of the short, staccato lines emphasizes the unpleasantly staggered process of consumption. In this view, capitalism has no space for waste: everything is to be consumed, everything serves to feed itself, in a self-destructive spectacle of orgiastic torment.

Throughout the lyrics in Evolution, the city is beset by a sequence of unnamed crises and catastrophes, as the slow decay of the urban environment is played out while the speaker tries to come to terms with what this might mean for collective action. In “Notell,” a poem that begins in “an unimaginable/Forest” and concludes with peculiarly vernacular statements on the British monarchy, Myles traces how “The rubied surface of/Deteriorating cities moves me” (90). It is unclear if the speaker is moved in the sense of an affective response to the ways in which the decay of a city resembles something precious and beautiful, or has been shallowly aestheticized, or if that movement is linked to political organization: in any case, the section closes with a vindication on action, “That is what we’re doing” (90). The work done by the italicized emphasis ensures the stress falls on this mutual endeavor, as though this is an impassioned defense of the work done by community organization against an accusation of not committing enough. Despite being involved in various grassroots political organizations that seeks to preserve certain aspects of New York City from the excessive forces of real estate profit and asset management, such as 1000 People 1000 Trees and East River Park Action, as we will see, Myles remains remarkably unsentimental about the nature of these transformations. “Everything changing is the nature of its sameness,” they write: “Sure, the corporate thing is quicker and bigger, but that’s more global now; that’s everywhere. It’s not about New York” (qtd. in Fitzgerald). Described by Myles as “the only place/that corresponds to my/need/to be every place/at once,” New York City becomes a stand-in or a stand-for its dual status as a global city with local crises (Evolution 95). While much of the Evolution collection is marked by the tenor of an unnamed crisis or crises affecting the city space, if not the events and ruptures of specific emergencies, the untitled prose-poem that opens the collection transitions from personal reflections on traveling through Palestine and Ukraine, before directly addressing the “Russia stuff” and the specific circumstances of Russian interference in the 2016 election (5). The crisis of American democracy and confidence in representative governance is a presiding theme of Evolution, attending to the allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian state actors. But the speaker’s anxiety also refers to a crisis of the idea of American democracy, particularly as it pertains to the “shining city on a hill” trope, which Myles criticizes then Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey for defending, even as he witnesses corruption in the Oval Office. “What hill,” Myles asks, bluntly, while desperately trying to understand why Comey’s testimony, in which he defends his loyalty to the Department of Justice, has made them cry while walking their dog on Commercial Street (5). Later, in “Washington,” Myles directs this despondency toward action:

I would like to do somethingbefore we mournthe end of Americandemocracy. (77)

Around the time that Myles wrote “Acceptance Speech” and performed it on the High Line to commemorate the anniversary of Zoe Leonard’s 1922 poem “I want a president,” “we honestly all thought Hillary [Clinton] was going to win at that moment” (7). The poem was envisioned as an anticipated acceptance speech for the first woman President-elect and, while Myles did not “presume that you all supported her,” they stress: “I do presume like me you might believe that what we had in November was a coup” and that “it was uncannily possible for us to have an open coup d’etat in America because the candidate was a woman” (7). Myles had supported Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign with a somewhat facile poem, “MOMENTUM 2016,” which narrates Clinton’s imagined campaign trail through Oregon and the northwest, in which “everyday a woman chooses to keep running” and closes with the name of a girl Myles met at Marfa Burrito, who was called “Victory!” (qtd. in Satran). Myles’ support for Clinton jars with the broader attacks, implicit in the case of “Acceptance Speech” and explicit in the case of “Letter for East River Park,” of the centrist Democratic Party and the place of representative democracy in the United States. The political poems of Evolution express a different approach, so much so that “MOMENTUM 2016” feels like an anachronistic anomaly, and offer instead various impassioned appeals to a localized framework of mutual aid, community-based resource allocation, and a defense of “the commons.”

As such, it is striking that critical evaluations of Myles’ political writing continues to focus on the expressivity of identity formation in their strictly lineated verse, which is often tacked to the left margin in compact lines that accelerate rather than slow poetic pace. When Evolution was published in 2018 critics addressed Myles’ disruption of gender normativity and how the poems enacted expressive visions of queer futurity. Writing in The New York Times, Natalie Diaz argued that “what makes queer and trans art dangerous is its willingness to wager its own future and expend the labor required to write oneself into the considerations of a nation” (Diaz). Talin Tahajian, for The Kenyon Review, addressed the formal elements of Myles’ verse, which “often feels typographically paratactic” and “unmarked by punctuation,” while arguing for the ways in which poetry is a means to “speak to the dead” (Tahajian). As Tahajian notes, many of the poems in Evolution can be read in this way as meandering elegies to Myles’ mother, who died from cancer, we are told, “on April 3rd” at the age of 96 (Evolution 1). One of these possible elegies is the poem “Sharing Fall,” which titularly suggests a shared seasonal experience of an East Coast autumn, like the fall of orange leaves in a public park (“your sunny/golden leaves/half”; 87), but only if we take “Fall” to be a noun and not a verb; otherwise the meaning shifts and the “Fall” (a fall from grace, a fall from something profound to something profane, a postlapsarian sin) is meaningful in that it is experienced in company and not alone. “Sharing Fall” begins with an admission of something having been eroded or absented, and which we might presume to be the “loss” of the speaker’s late mother, but that is redeemed by the possibilities of sharing an experience of not having or going without something, but in the company of others:

I lostmy lossin a collectiveof lossI could reachin and graba fist ofthem savingthem fromthe rainmy mouth isred for everychild whohas starvedeatingthe corpseof theirfather ormother. (84)

The stress on different forms of “loss” in the first four lines subsumes a personal experience of mourning into something shared with others. On the one hand, the pain of that loss is diminished by a universalized experience of having lost as a conditional cost of making attachments in the world, while at the same time the strength of any emotional content of how we feel when we lose – profound grief, listlessness, inconsolable periods of mourning – has itself been reduced by that knowledge. These opening lines operate at this incommensurable boundary, and can be read as either a celebratory statement, as in “my loss is made more bearable in the knowledge that others, too, have lost,” or that an individual loss is overwhelmed by others’ experiences.

In the poem “BP,” with its initialism suggestive of British Petroleum, Myles once again struggles to remember the language of their past through the language of class:

The bottom line’s gotta be classI write in this nowhardly able to remember the wordthat means she writes like she soundsI like the breath of a stretchyou read that, hear me. (Evolution 42)

The poem connects the problem of singularization and iterability with the striking deictic effects of the lyric, in which Myles calls attention to the sensory differences between reading a poem and hearing it spoken in the poet’s voice: a difference of poetic experience that the lyric traditionally, as an imitation of a speech act, looks to elide. This strophe begins with the distinct language of money, as the “bottom line” refers to the final total of an account or balance sheet, and it is within this fundamental constraint of “class” that the poet cannot help but write against. The aural proximity of “breath” and “stretch” lightly coalesces the two verbs, and in doing so conjoins an expression with an exertion that allows the lines to operate in an enticing back-and-forth with the reader, in which by reading we also listen. Elsewhere, this conversational quality takes on a more political dimension:

I’m not talking to myself I’m conductingan extremely intimate exchange with mygovernment[.] (90)

By declaring to be in “in/timate exchange” with the government, Myles bypasses traditional forms of political participation – the election, the rally, the congressional petition – in favor of the closeness and confidentiality of this performatively spoken exchange, while also making a claim about the fundamentally social and public, rather than subjective and interior, nature of poetic address. Of course, when using the multivalent and deictic “I” and “you,” the lyric poet can address anyone – fellow poets, lovers, friends, the sun, God, the general reader, oneself, or no one at all – and so Myles calls the reader’s attention to the directly political content of this address. Part of Myles’ lyric style adopts the tone of the colloquial response, or retort, as in the opening here – “I’m not talking to my/self” – which self-reflexively comments on the accusation that the lyric form is too introspective and asocial. By closing two lines with the possessive “my,” the poet connects the public and private spheres that this poem navigates, but does so in a profound model of self-ownership and governance, as though the state is or could be as near and as intimate as one’s body. As this exchange progresses, Myles turns to the question of state provision and a poeticization of sharing:

I’m not here to conFuse the governmentWhat I’veGot I share. (90)

The forced enjambment of the word “con/Fuse” severs the line and plays on the possibility, as we read, of a denial of “conning,” or deceiving, the government – a common accusation made by the conservative right against those on social security provision. Instead, by beginning the line with “Fuse” as a suggested contradiction (the word is fractured, not conjoined), the following claim on “What I’ve/Got” feels like a causal statement that leaves it up to personal conscience on what to keep for oneself and what to share. The speaker defends a categorical position, however, and argues that in their world of things everything is shared – not ought to be – among many without distinction, a reallocation of resources as both the self-interested reality of collectively managing scarce resources and a utopian approach that challenges the state. It is this latter concept, of a “utopian” envisioning of “something missing,” that animates the opening prose-poem. Quoting the Martinique poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, Myles writes of the “force” of utopia as that which enables “each of us … to be able to approach, intuit, touch, seize upon the inextricable of the world” and that which affirms our sense of being “all young before the world” (Evolution 33). This idea of sharing as a fundamentally utopian concept relates to Myles’ broader anti-capitalist convictions in terms of what the role and use of poetry should be in the context of a market economy. The politics of sharing, which is to say an ethics of dividing resources against the pressures of material scarcity, has often informed Myles’ autobiographical writing. In Inferno: A Poet’s Novel (2010), Myles recounts the compositional process of writing “An American Poem,” perhaps their most well-recognized work, which substitutes the “true” familial experience of growing up poor in Boston with the fortunes of that city’s – and the nation’s – most famous political dynasty. It’s important to note that this forms part of a grant application for funds that resonates with the broader anxiety around material scarcity and the instrumentalized “use-value” of the arts. “I am a Kennedy,” Myles writes, inexplicably, in a mode of interpersonal identification which jars with the ostensible facts of Myles’ life:

I was born in Boston in 1949 the poem starts. It’s so easy to perform this poem because I just start talking about my life. It’s what I do. I mean–in some ways I have been writing this proposal for thirty years certainly since 1984 when I thought surely now that I’m the director of the Poetry Project I will be able to get significant support from an important private foundation. But now I’m suspecting that the working class person only knows how to make herself a more exalted kind of multiple. What’s wrong with that. Growing up, adults always said: if I give it to you I will have to give it to everyone. Well give it to me I say. I am everyone. That’s exactly who I am. (116)

The reflection moves from the basic assumptions of beginning autobiographical writing – with the markers of birthplace and year – to the familiar burdens of sourcing external funding for arts initiatives, even those on the moneyed-bohemian Lower East Side and even those with the considerable literary reputation of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, which Myles directed for two years until 1986. It is notable that the untitled prose piece that inaugurates Evolution begins in a similar way, narrating the basic facts of a life through the unstable truths of the lyricized and multivocal “I” (“I am Ann Lee. I thought that was a good place to start. I am Eileen Myles. I am 67 years old”) that both is and is not the speaker’s own. The speaker then transitions from an overlaid confluence of professed identities to the reader, a seemingly specific and individuated reader, in a triangulation of address: “I am writing to you from Cape Cod. It was a horrible week” (1). This statement has an obviously familiar tone, and the “you” may be an expressly identifiable recipient of the letter or the coaxed intimacy of a generalized reader. Barbara Johnson argues that such a use of “you” represents a “digression in discourse” and such a “speech situation is [… always] about the poet,” a display of aloneness and solitary expression in which “[n]either the judge nor the addressee is really the object of the poetic utterance” (5–8).

But in identifying as different speakers at different times, and restlessly expanding that model of identification to include the excluded, Myles expresses a desire at least to open and share the burden of political responsibility against the weight of a personal loss (in this case, their late mother). In the Inferno extract, the capaciousness of the pronouns recalls Walt Whitman’s modes of exclamatory expression (“I am everyone. That’s exactly who I am”),¹ while making a claim on the valorization of coded practices of sharing or not sharing within the context of being unwilling or unable to share with the whole community. Myles makes two interwoven claims with this recollection from their working-class childhood: the first, that growing up poor involved a mixture of personal pride and professed care (our ethics stem from the imperative to share because we are all poor) with a contradictory form of relational individualism (because of that ethical code we cannot share because we are all poor); and, second, what this might mean for the lyric form, as an address to the other on behalf of the group that is founded in working-class experiences of insufficiency and want. The idea of working-class identity representing “a more exalted kind of multiple” offers a compelling way of reading Myles’ expressions of political responsibility in Evolution, a collection that trades in the problem of what belongs in common trust and what belongs to oneself and oneself alone.

In “Dear Adam,” which makes twelve expressions of “I” or “I’m” across 35 lines, Myles focuses on the cost of sharing and theft in the context of migration, colonialism, and modes of collective resistance. We, the speaker, argues

live in a stolen country that was always stolen

and worked largely by stolen people. Out of a conservative

diaspora came I mongrel poet from Massachusetts

to make my mark

love & these things and opportunities

to speak. We can’t fall down we teem in the new

opportunity

we discover what resistance means (190–191)

Myles grew up in Middlesex County and the Cambridge, Somerville, and Arlington areas of Boston to mixed Irish and Polish ancestry. In 2018, the same year as Evolution was released, Gavin Doyle published an article on diasporic melancholia and the loss of Irish-American identity in Myles’ poetry. Broadly Freudian in its methodology, Doyle’s argument is that in two works of their autobiographical fiction – Chelsea Girls (1994) and Cool for You (2000) – Myles forcefully represents “twentieth-century working-class Irish-American ethnicity as an identity profoundly structured by loss and mourning […] and produces, in emotional and imaginative forms, the obsessive refusal to leave the dead behind” (Doyle 80). In “Dear Adam,” the snarl of the bilabial nasal “m” sound in the alliterative “mongrel, “Massachusetts,” “make,” and “mark” performs an emergent drama of “making it” in America. The archaic tone of “came I,” as though a heroic emergence into uncharted territory, is held in tension with the images of conservatism and ethnic hybridity, as the speaker moves toward an expanded field of shared and not individuated enterprise as “resistance.” The making of the mark as a statement of personal success or overcoming adversity transitions causally, if not through the indeterminate punctuation of the poem, to the emphasis on “love” and opportunity to speak in a communal environment, which is a hallmark of Myles’ writing and activism on the East River Park on the Lower East Side.

Similarly, in “Sharing Fall,” the inheritances of immigrant working-class identity, both personal and political, are vexed as the speaker’s exposition of loss and mourning is followed by a macabre image of possible parricide and thwarted cannibalism. What would compel a child, indeed several children, to eat their mother and father? Why, too, would that make them starve, and be deserving of the speaker’s sympathy? What should we make of the speaker’s “red” mouth, which implies both bloody consumption and an oral erotics? It is intriguing and disturbing that an elegiac poem about personal loss, on the death of one’s mother, should take on such a perverse vision of the experience of death between parents and children. The image can be understood in one of two ways: the first, that by consuming the parent the child acknowledges their poverty, their desperation and need to eat; and, the second, that the child needs to devour the parent in order to move forward in their life, and to regain some of the control lost to the “collective/of loss” (84). In its totality, the poem is concerned with these subjects of generational trauma, and several images that intersperse reflections on “a dead/one” speak to the atmospheric conditions of a climate emergency in which the lyric self is unable to properly respond: not being capable to “remember/what I said” then becomes a “translation/of weather” (88).

The sensory abstraction of climate change, compounded by the non-palpable accumulation of risks, thwarts the coherence of translating the world of the poet into the lyric form. It recalls “pulling back” from the “yellow border” of childhood memories, like sharing a birthday with “a famous clown,” but also engages with the difficulty of writing a poetics without seasons, which is to say writing poems against the disruption of seasonal consistency exacerbated by climate change and against the lyric modes of address that have fundamentally co-implicated the writing of the lyric with the changing of the seasons (84). The atmospheric conditions of weather and climate are seldom neutral in Evolution, but verge on dangerous extremes, as in the image of the aggressive “fist” that seeks to save the vulnerable from “the rain” (84). More recently, the acknowledgment of the climate crisis as a violent threat, exacerbated as it is by the increasing vulnerability of New York City’s environmental security, led Myles to return to the overtly political address or petition.

In 2021 Myles self-published a prose-poem and manifesto, “Letter for East River Park,” which was an impassioned address to the lawmakers and city-planners responsible for the East River Park redevelopment plan. In it, Myles returns to the accusation of a “stolen country” (Evolution 190), and specifically the “ongoing and unacknowledged GENOCIDE” of the Lenapeyok people (“Letter for East River Park” 6). In this, Myles co-joins two events: the first, a 1643 massacre of the indigenous population of the Pavonia on the west bank of the Hudson River, when Dutch colonialists led by Governor-Director Willem Kieft murdered over a hundred Lenape people who were seeking refuge from the rival Iroquois tribe; and, the second, the planned reconstruction of East River Park on the same sliver of eastern Manhattan in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. “Letter for East River Park” was first performed by Myles on the steps of The David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building in June 2021, and later set to music by Reuben Butchart as “Land Grab” and published on Bandcamp in August 2021.

The prose-poem begins with a long mode of address, first to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and then to various stakeholders of the East River Park redevelopment plan, or the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project, including “the Delaware Tribe of Indians” and “Stockbridge Munsee Mohican Community” (“Letter for East River Park” 1). In the 1980s, during a period of accelerated natural resource privatization, the nascent environmental justice movement campaigned against what was then defined as “environmental racism,” or how toxicity levels and insufficient environmental defenses disproportionately inflicted a slow violence against Americans already suffering from the economic costs of deficient housing and underfunded infrastructure. By linking the contemporary problem of how communities and municipal leaders can build common consent for programs responding to the crisis of climate change with the historical legacies of colonialism and genocide of indigenous peoples, Myles reminds the recipients of their letter that the way we organize the cities we live in severely replicates broader social and economic inequalities.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused $65 billion worth of damage in the United States. The path of its destruction included large portions of Alphabet City and the Lower East Side, and the New York Council considered various proposals for a robust flood mitigation project and voted to approve the controversial $1.45 billion ESCR project in December 2019. It was not the first time that this strip of Manhattan was radically re-envisioned. The East River Park was built under Robert Moses’ transformation of New York in the early twentieth century; before that, the East River waterfront was a thriving shipping port and once had a major city amphitheater, built in 1941. Many of the city’s poorest migrant laborers lived there. Today it is a higgledy-piggledy stretch of land that is precariously located between busy FDR Drive and the East River itself. Defenders of the ESCR claim the plan will provide an essential “undulating berm” – an elevated stretch of land functioning as a blockade between the river and the park (Gessen). The environmental benefits of the ESCR were widely challenged by the East River Park Action community group.

In their 2021 essay “Mayor Robber: The pointless demolition of Manhattan’s East River Park” for Artforum, Myles describes their fight “to save this vernacular gem of a park” against the “warlike logic of our mayor [Bill de Blasio] and the New York Department of Design and Construction,” who argued that, far from demolishing the park, they would be “renovating it, protecting it, renewing it, salvaging it, updating it, anything what they are actually doing right now which is demolishing it.” De Blasio, for Myles, showed a “distinctive contempt for the city’s common.” The rhetorical utility of “the commons,” referring to land and resources belonging to the whole community, is repeated throughout Myles’ late work, and is restated in “Letter for East River Park”: “WE rise to protect public space,” Myles writes: “community space, air and water, THE COMMONS” (“Letter for East River Park” 5). In this appeal, Myles draws on a particular language of common ownership models, many of which continue to prove their remarkable capacity to steward nature and resources sustainably and fairly. While the language of “the commons” remains intimately tied to Garrett Hardin’s popularization of “the tragedy of the commons” as a framework for rationalizing the depletion of public space due to private and self-interested motivations, Myles poeticizes a framework used by climate activists, scientists, and civic planners with renewed purpose as a means of reclaiming public space to help protect against climate change (Hardin 1243–1248).

In their epistolary address, Myles figures local flashpoints against broader, global issues, especially the financialization of the natural world under the rouse of acting against the climate emergency. Myles notes the installation of “a big box store into the wetlands of Staten Island” and the “sudden emergency demolitions on Hart’s Island” amongst other “assault[s]” on the health of New Yorkers amidst the “massive confiscation of public lands” (“Letter for East River Park” 4). In a sarcastic dismissal of the media’s derision of these issues as parochial and not of broader national or global interest, Myles notes: “yeah yeah yeah it’s all LOCAL issues,” before asserting:

But NEW YORK IS A COASTAL CITY AND THE LARGEST URBAN CENTER IN NORTH AMERICA.

THIS IS A GLOBAL ISSUE, that’s right. (“Letter for East River Park” 4)

The issue of climate change can feel at once fundamental and abstracted from the senses, in terms of its conventional mediation as statistics and scientific monitoring technologies, and the contemporary artist or poet who seeks to represent climate change in their work struggles to express the multiple categories of its consequences in time. Responding to this difficulty, Paul James and Brad Haylock have argued that art “is caught between, on the one hand, the continuing importance of concrete representations of the world, and, on the other, a discontinuous generalizing abstraction of the social forces that make up this world” (32). As such, Myles’ emphasis on the precarity of New York City and its vulnerability, like many other large metropolitan areas, to the threat of rising tidal waters and inadequate protective coastal infrastructure is represented as a flashpoint in a necessarily global context of community responses to the threat of climate change. Given that the island of Manhattan is densely populated and severely jeopardized by the consequences of extreme weather, Myles represents the case of East River Park as at once global and local.

Myles implores each of these stakeholders – federal, municipal, tribal – to act now to save East River Park from a development plan that Myles believes will destroy public space in the name of protecting it: after all, they write, “YOU CAN’T TAKE BACK A TRAGEDY” and “it is not too late” to change course (“Letter for East River Park” 5)). What was the tragedy that Myles looked to prevent? In various Instagram posts to their over 34,000 followers, Myles has sought to mobilize support for the campaign against the revised ESCR proposal in expressive and often lyrical ways: “NEW YORK’S RESPONSE TO GLOBAL WARMING & CLIMATE CHANGE IS TO KILL A PARK” reads one, in Myles’ trademark scrawl (Figure 1; “Come see deBlasio’s state of the art green plan”). Another calls for “1000 people” to gather and protect “1000 trees” at the East River Park Amphitheater on December 6, 2021 (Figure 2; “Time Has Come”). Above rudimentary sketches of a tree, flowers, and a part-erased skull and-crossed-bones, Myles performs a call and response: “HOW MANY PEOPLE DOES IT TAKE TO STOP A CITY OF DEATH. EVERYONE” (Figure 2; “Time Has Come”). These posts serve an obviously organizational purpose, and represent only a handful of the hundreds of thousands of social media posts over the last decade that have sought to mobilize support for rallies, marches, and community-based activism in response to the climate emergency and the threat posed by the enclosure of public space. Throughout “Letter to East River Park,” and in an echo of the heightened public oratory style of “Acceptance Speech,” Myles writes in a charged rhetoric of communal trust, arguing for new governance structures for collective stewardship after the Covid-19 pandemic, when the 100,000 New Yorkers who annually recreate on East River Park relied on access to public space more than ever.

Figure 1. Eileen Myles [@eileen.myles]. December 8, 2021. Instagram. Accompanying text reads, “Come see deBlasio’s state of the art green plan for meeting climate resiliency head on. Remember world: if you can make it here, they’ll make it anywhere. It’s all new, it’s up to you New York.”

Figure 2. Eileen Myles [@eileen.myles]. December 5, 2021. Instagram. Accompanying text reads, “Time has come. Be there. Show up. Wake up. Be strong. Be sleepy. Be there. Monday morning 630 am at the amphitheatre east river park December 6, 2021.”.

However, many of these posts call attention to their status as writing because of how they intersect with the ostensibly more “poetic” content of Myles’ work. As in Ben Lerner’s definition of the “voice-mail genre” of the lyric poem, an expanded sense of how contemporary technologies communicate and how “the message takes on a life of its own, becomes a fragment of another present renewed by a recipient in whatever near or distant future” (Lerner), Myles’ Instagram posts share this commonly recognized temporal feature of the traditional verse lyric. Describing Instagram as a “real new playground,” Myles has argued that “poetry is in a really great moment right now because of all the social media and texting; it’s both a place where you can drop a line” (qtd. in Weaver). For Myles, the ostensible lyricism of the new forms of communication technology, of leaving a line or sharing a post, specifically relates back to models of poetic expression.

If the poeticization of Instagram necessarily entails rethinking models of the lyric, it also means rethinking the possibilities for political organization and the place of poetry to represent the moving target of the climate crisis at a momentary event. Myles’ late-career poetry resists the usual expectations of what has been called “late style,” if we take that to mean a working against feelings of belatedness, in which the poet cannot overcome the weight of being out of place and time, a problem that is then struggled against often without hope of resolution. Instead, by integrating Instagram posts, protest letters, and the ephemerality of multiple forms of writing into a framework of the “poetic,” Myles creates works that are entirely consistent with both the struggle for a poetic discourse in the social media age as well as the casual immediacy of their verse experiments since moving to the East Village in 1977. But what is most revelatory about the poems in Evolution is the way that Myles constructs lyrical models for the expression of class consciousness: the problem and possibility of sharing against material scarcity, the challenges of building a democratic movement against excessive wealth inequality, the participation of local communities to organize and manage their public spaces that are threatened with closure by municipal and corporate governance. These poems manage to at once address these systemic, global crises like a dialogue between friends. These poems feel like a conversation. They feel like they are addressed to you.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ See Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself.”