Eileen Myles Now

In the conversation between Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson that we commissioned for this issue, the two writers begin by reflecting on the recent article about Myles published in The New York Times (May 18, 2022). The article focuses on Myles’ fight against the destruction of trees in East River Park on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, close to the apartment where Myles has lived since the 1970s. Myles complains of the article, “I’m so sick of the public account of who I am. It’s not like I think I’m a household name, but those same particular details have been trotted out so many times – it’s like sitting through a boring introduction of yourself at a reading.” It is perhaps inevitable that any biographical account of Myles will bore its subject, whose various existences include being a subcultural icon. Nelson responds to this problem, though, by reflecting on how the narrative of Myles’ life and work continually changes, if only by, for example, adding more decades to the amount of time Myles has lived in New York City. Nelson declares, “wow, what an honor for me to have heard you thinking about time, for the past thirty years,” which leads Myles to reflect on how the “constant movement” of time exists beyond any judgment of its quality: “I think probably the thing that was so disturbing about what happened in the park was the trees are that too. They’re this incredibly beautiful collective austere rendition of time that we live among and around. And a park is one of the many studios of the writer.”

In American (and specifically New York City) poetry, trees and leaves become, both literally and metaphorically, books, poems, and people. Think, for example, of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), John Ashbery’s Some Trees (1956), and Myles’ own Sorry, Tree (2007). Myles has themself been around since 1949, and their work – currently twenty-two books, with a new anthology of Pathetic Literature announced on Instagram as we write – is itself being increasingly recognized as a beautiful collection of time. As is the case for Nelson and many others, for we who are editing this special issue of Women’s Studies on “Eileen Myles Now,” reading, writing and thinking about Myles’ work has become part of our living room, our studio. Our hope is that this special issue will open this studio up for more people to read, teach, and write about Myles and their world, thereby furthering Myles’ own ambition for their writing in For Now (2020):

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 disappear with Eileen Myles–the opposite of appearing in The New York Times–is then to begin to inhabit their work more fully.

Along with Myles themself, many of their readers are likely to find any biography of them redundant, as their autofictive prose in Chelsea Girls (1994), Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) (2010), Cool for You (2017), and Afterglow: A Dog Memoir (2017) – to say nothing of their poetry – has itself mapped a constellation of their biography. It is not all in their books, though, and this issue seeks to introduce new readers to Myles’ work, so the central stars of this constellation bear repeating: Myles grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Arlington, a suburb of Boston bordering Cambridge. They graduated from the University of Massachusetts Boston in 1971, and moved to New York City in 1974 where, as they write in “An American Poem,” “I thought/Well I’ll be a poet./What could be more/foolish and obscure./I became a lesbian” (Not Me 135). They studied briefly at Queens College, until a teacher told them about the poetry of Frank O’Hara and the St. Mark’s Poetry Project downtown, which led Myles to quit graduate school and become an informal student of St. Mark’s, where they “attend[ed] almost every single reading for ten years,” and took part in workshops with Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan, among others (“Eileen Myles –bios”). From 1977 to 1979 they published the poetry magazine dodgems, which is the focus of Stephanie Anderson’s article in this issue. In 1979 they also worked as the assistant to an ailing James Schuyler, who had himself been an assistant to W. H. Auden. From 1984 to 1986 Myles served as the artistic director of St. Mark’s.

Myles published their first four books of poetry in the late 70s and early 80s, but it wasn’t until Not Me came out with Semiotext(e) in 1991 that they began to receive wider recognition. Not Me includes Myles’ most famous poem, “An American Poem,” which has inspired many Google searches asking, “Is Eileen Myles a Kennedy?” (They are not, as far as we know.) In 1992 Myles ran for president of the United States as an “openly female” write-in candidate, going on tour across the country as a political performance. Chelsea Girls, a collection of autofictive vignettes destined to become a cult classic, first came out in 1994.. In 1995 they coedited, with Liz Kotz, The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading (Semiotext(e)). In 2002 Myles began teaching at the University of California San Diego, where they worked for five years, and they have intermittently taught classes and workshops at New York University since 2013. In 2015 HarperCollins released I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975–2014, and also rereleased Chelsea Girls. In 2016 Myles won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2017 Yale University’s Beinecke Library purchased 108 linear feet of their archives. Their 2019 Windham-Campbell Lecture at Yale was published as For Now. In 2021 they were elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Their success is at least as popular as institutional: Myles has over 35,000 followers of their prolific and often enigmatic Instagram account, and appeared in Jill Soloway’s Amazon series Transparent (2014–2019), which includes not only their poetry, but also a character inspired by them, played by Cherry Jones. They began discussion with Amazon for a production of Chelsea Girls, but when the project fell through, they made the short (seventeen-minute) road movie The Trip (2019) with David Fenster instead – it’s available on YouTube.

Despite the fact that this litany of achievements is likely to bore Myles, it nevertheless showcases at least some of the fascinating variousness of Myles’ life and work. Perhaps it is this variousness, or the tired moniker of Myles as a “punk poet” (“that’s code for class and dyke,” they point out (Interview with Rosa Campbell)) that helps explain their neglect by academics. Indeed, in one fell swoop this special issue nearly doubles the number of published articles and book chapters on Myles. One prominent discussion of Myles is in José Esteban Muñoz’s field-defining book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009). Reflecting on a passage from Chelsea Girls in which the character Eileen describes her relationship with Schuyler, Muñoz writes that “this passage could be seen as representing an anti-antirelationality that is both weirdly reparative and a prime example of the queer utopianism for which I am arguing” (14). Anti-antirelationality is a generative way of framing Myles’ variousness, which – as the conversation between them and Nelson evinces – leads them to continually position their work against its own terms of reception. Being antirelational suggests eschewing poetic community, but in being anti-antirelational Myles has continually formed community against existing cliques and dogmas. For instance, Libbie Rifkin has shown how Myles and Schuyler create a form of queer kinship where the care of illness and disability becomes personally and poetically generative for both of them. Myles’ relationship to poetic community could also be fraught, though, symbolized most poignantly by the perverse pleasure they took in St Mark’s Church burning down in 1978 (Kane 173).

Myles’ complex relationship to community is echoed by later poets and writers in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel (and reviewed by Gina Gwenffrewi in this issue), as they negotiate their own varying and variable forms of relation to the nebulous concepts of poetic tradition and community. Indeed, although Myles does not appear in the anthology, many of its contributions can be read in dialogue with their own performance of nonchalance and rage, insouciance and loneliness, melancholy and joy. CAConrad’s poem “Encircling This Day With Centipede Coordination” offers the most direct engagement with Myles in We Want It All, beginning “Dear Eileen have we sunk the shine” (We Want It All 65). Apostrophes like this are common in works by Conrad, who began documenting their travels by writing “letters” to Myles on their Facebook page in 2016, before transforming “Dear Eileen” into a leitmotif across their work. In the sculptural landscape poem “for Eileen Myles,” which we commissioned for this issue, Conrad once again invokes their friend and hero with “Dear Eileen,” this time toward the end of the poem, as if Myles has been there all along, reading, listening, and nodding along; less audience than participant, less muse than instigator. It is perhaps no surprise that this poem, written as Myles continues to campaign on behalf of East River Park, resembles trees. In “I Loved Earth Years Ago,” one of Conrad’s most harrowing and important pieces, they end a set of incandescent reflections on climate catastrophe and the execution of their boyfriend, Earth, with the gentle sign-off, “Love you Eileen, and thanks for listening.” Myles is not just listening, however, they are also writing back – endlessly, obliquely, explicitly, to their communities, and to CAConrad. In their essay “Yoga for Losers II,” they refer to Conrad’s The Book of Frank as “unstoppable poetry that hurts and turns a mirror to pain and risks being viewed as the problem when CA you’re the cure.”

One of the key communities that Myles is often seen as writing within or against is the New York School. Maggie Nelson’s chapter on Myles in Women, the New York School, and Other Abstractions (2007) has arguably set the stage for all subsequent scholarship on Myles, and in it she interrogates the idea of Myles as “the last of the New York School poets” (170), as Ted Berrigan once called them. She puts “the lesbian, especially butch, body” at the center in her analysis of Myles’ relationship to the gay, male canon of New York School poets, arguing that “it is largely due to Myles’ presence on the scene that the queerness of the New York School does not surreptitiously slip into signifying only male homosexuality” (171). For Nelson, Myles is a poet of the body, of physical presence and vocalization, and their place in her book is one that remakes the New York School in Myles’ image. It is through this remaking, perhaps, that the significant line of influence between Nelson and Myles becomes clearest, and in the interview included in this issue that line of influence is reiterated, the back-and-forth between the two writers alternately abstract and practical, poetic and familial. In her chapter on Myles, Nelson also emphasizes their political flânerie in such poems as “Hot Night” from Not Me, which is the focus of the coda to Jack Parlett’s recent book, Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr (2022). While queer identity and theory have been the primary lenses through which scholars have read Myles’ work, Gavin Doyle and Gary Lenhart have both written about their working-class identity. As these scholars make clear, Myles’ experience of being white working-class has included trauma and loss, from surviving sexual violence to witnessing the accidental death of their father at the age of seven. Such trauma and loss provide another way of understanding Myles’ continual transitions, which as Joel Duncan shows in his article in this issue, are inseparable from catastrophe, whether personal or global.

Looking back across their career it can seem as though Myles has been enacting O’Hara’s lines in “Meditations in an Emergency”: “How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus – the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!)” (197). Myles bursts forth even from O’Hara’s bosom. As Nick Sturm – following Daniel Kane in his book “Do you have a band?”: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City (2017) – elaborates in his article in this issue, Myles embraced both O’Hara and “the International Fuck Frank O’Hara Movement.” Myles’ anti-antirelationality is full of such double turns, which might be described as a kind of biting levity, obliquely intoned by the title to their first book, The Irony of the Leash (1978). In Queer Troublemakers: The Poetics of Flippancy (2019), Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain shows how “Myles’ work thrives on unbecoming, using levity as a means to undo category distinctions and gender binaries” (135). Myles’ levity thereby becomes a response to catastrophe, a means of leveraging hurt to make poetry sing.

It is tempting, as scholars, to try to pin Myles down: as “the last of the New York School poets,” as a lone wolf, a working-class Bostonian, a one-time presidential hopeful, a cult figure, or a punk. The moniker of eternal sameness is (eternally) seductive. But Myles’ work is that of a writer and a person who refuses to be pinned down to anything other than their unmistakable, audacious vernacular. This is, perhaps, the always-already problem of working on living writers – they do insist on changing, on responding to the contemporary moment, on being unhelpfully human. Yet Myles seems particularly given to flux. They have always been positioned at intersections; between, for example, “generations” of the New York School, in which lineage they inhabit the uncertain “third generation” – only five years younger than Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer and Anne Waldman, yet taught by them at the Poetry Project, assistant to James Schuyler, yet ideologically and often aesthetically aligned with poets thirty years younger than themself. They sit similarly ambiguously and variously between the New York School, Language poetry, and the punk, riot grrrl, and performance scenes; between Lower East Side local icon and global queer touchstone.

In naming this issue “Eileen Myles Now,” then, we are making a statement about both how the still-developing field of Myles Studies looks now, and how it might look in the near future as more work is published about their writing. This temporal gambit is hardly unusual in academic writing, and in using it we follow the suit of comparable examples that are germane for thinking about Myles. Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York School Poet, for example, edited by Robert Hampson and Will Montgomery, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2010, at a time when, as the editors note, the New York School poet’s reputation had become higher “‘than at any time after his death” (1). The argument for the continued resonance of a particular writer’s work is, in many ways, a bedrock of literary studies. This critical assumption about relevance is at the heart of the way critics and scholars default to what Paul K. Saint-Amour identifies as the “literary present,” so often used when discussing (certain, usually canonical) dead writers. While this tense bears an obvious function as a marker of literary value, in its suggestion that a text (and author’s) continued life is proof of some eternal wisdom, Saint-Amour argues that it also illuminates a mode of reading that is based upon notions of queer and utopian temporality.

Time has been an important locus in queer studies over the last fifteen or so years. Key terms like Jack Halberstam’s “queer time” – “a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance and child reading” – versus “straight time” (2) and Elizabeth Freeman’s “chrononormativity,” which describes the “use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” and a “technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts” (3), have become mainstays in the discipline’s vocabulary. The ways in which temporality can (or cannot) be reclaimed from normative structures, and harnessed for queer ends, is frequently a point of distinction between queer theory’s utopian faction, on the one hand, and the negative or anti-social faction, on the other, exemplified by such thinkers as Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. Muñoz brings to this field a critique of the here and now as an example of “straight time” (25), and affirms instead the importance of queer futurity as a more hopeful worldview, a release from the “quagmire” of the political present (1). But as Saint-Amour shows in his gloss on Muñoz, the present tense behaves not just as a stranglehold but as a site of communion; in a literary context, the use of the present tense suggests a model of reading in which writers from the past might be seen to meet with their readers. This form of the literary present might be “decoded as a kind of future,” a “utopian temporal mechanics” that imagines the textual artifact as an address to “readers in the future” (387).

Even if the literary present is frequently used (whether consciously or not) to revitalize or lionize literary forebears, and is available to queer temporal framings, its usage surely differs in the case of living writers, whose relevance is conferred, in the first instance, by the fact of their being alive, and still writing. Eileen Myles has remained responsive in different ways to contemporary events throughout their career, so the carving out of their work “now” feels, at first, like a partial episode in their story, one that is subject to change. Indeed, it is not simply that Myles is changeable, but that their work is fundamentally fascinated by change, from the blooming of age (“I’m immoderately/in love with you,/knocked out by/all your new/white hair” (I Must Be Living Twice 112)), to the vagaries of the marketplace (“Fresca’s got a new look/but I’m not drinking/that” (Evolution 209), to the blurry, shifting experience of eras (“There was a/whole moment in the 70s when it was beautiful/to have holes in your shirts and sweaters./By now it was 1981, but I carried that 70s style/around like a torch” (I Must Be Living Twice 82). Even their characteristic short lines suggest a poet constantly moving on to the next thing, accumulating or discarding moment after moment.

A literary approach to Myles’ work “now,” of the kind exemplified by the Frank O’Hara edited collection, thus addresses important questions about their work and its reception, as well as the changing backdrop of concerns and ideas that inform it. The “now” of our title also has in its ears the shifting political contexts in which Myles writes, and their identity as a trans writer invites us to look to the dynamic field of trans studies in situating their work. We might turn then, for example, to a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, edited by Susan Stryker and published in August 2020 with the title Trans* Studies Now. Stryker notes in the introduction how the issue was “already somewhat dated by the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences,” and was pulled together using work “I found readily at hand,” making it less a “fully-fledged ‘state of the field’ and more a casual snapshot that documents something about the moment, when questions abound about what trans* studies has become and what it’s doing, both in the academy and the wider world” (299). Stryker’s own work in trans* studies has similarly pointed to the complexity of the “now” as a temporal phenomenon, and in numerous lectures titled “What Transpires Now,” she identifies nowness as the site where history meets with and illuminates the vexed political present. As a temporal marker that is always-already expiring, the now bears the political weight of living in the present while frequently presuming the frame of the “casual snapshot.”

Myles’ dynamic relationship to their gender frequently inhabits the now of the political moment, their self-identifications alive to contemporary conversations. When, as editors, we were approached to put together this special issue, our initial response was one mindful of the tension between Myles’ gender identity and the journal’s title. Despite the excellent and varied output of Women’s Studies, and its stated aim, back in 1972, to “provide a forum to discuss and explore the implications of feminism for scholarship and art” (Martin 1), it was imperative for us that discussion of Myles not be folded unthinkingly or easily into the notion of “women’s studies.” Throughout their career, Myles’ work has performed radically generative fluidities of gender, inhabiting expansive forms of masculinity and femininity in order to push at the boundaries of both. For a number of years, Myles has been discussing publicly their ongoing negotiation with their gender; of their use of gender-neutral pronouns, they have said that “I thought a collective gender might be a place where I could be really comfortable, and it turns out to be true” (qtd. in French), and they have also asserted that “I’m happy complicating what being a woman, a dyke, is. I’m the gender of Eileen” (qtd. in Levy).

Myles’ interest in the identity of “dyke” as part of this gender interrogation recalls Monique Wittig’s notion that “lesbians are not women” because such categories exist only according to heterosexuality’s need to maintain an oppositional gender structure (32). In a recent New York Times film by Caroline Berler, Myles states: “I identify, I think, as a ‘they’ lesbian, and a butch and a dyke. I think I’m trans.” For Myles, then, it seems that “dyke” is a category that sits outside a gender binary, allowing them to occupy both the historical, subcultural legacy of lesbianism, and something vaster, more cosmological, more universal. In their 1994 talk given at St Mark’s, “The Lesbian Poet,” Myles suggests that after coming out “as a poet and a dyke maybe all in one reading […] it seemed that I was everything, all at once, after that” (123). It is also this urge toward the universal that makes Myles – and their work – resistant to a reductive focus on their gender and sexuality. In “The Lesbian Poet” they go on to suggest that “A lesbian is just an idea. An aesthetic one perhaps” (125), a notion that seems to be taken up again in their conversation with Nelson in this issue, when they note that their gender, amongst other things, is “only interesting as it becomes vaguer and vaguer to me.” We are excited to be republishing in this special issue “The Lesbian Poet,” which originally appeared in their now difficult to get ahold of book, School of Fish (1997). In this hallmark essay Myles thinks about gender in terms of literary influence and identity, arguing that creativity is quintessentially figured as male, while realizing that they are also “a man” (125) at the same time as they affirm the importance of their female anatomy – and specifically their menstrual cycle (in their 1998 story “Heat” they write about being perimenopausal in related terms) – for poetic composition.

In 2016 Myles wrote a piece for Buzzfeed, endorsing then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on the grounds that “she does have a vagina and wouldn’t you want it sitting on the chair in the Oval Office (not to get all weird) because things will never be the same […] It’s why I ran (against her husband) in 1992. I wanted my vagina on that chair” (“Hillary Clinton: The Leader You Want When the World Ends”). As Matthew Holman discusses in his article in this issue, Myles’ support for Clinton’s campaign often seemed to be at odds with their work’s broader anti-establishment attitude, and in the Buzzfeed article they caveat this statement of desire not only with the note that Clinton has “a killer vagina. With it she has murdered women in Pakistan,” but also with the clarification that they know they’re engaging in “some essentialism.” It’s a provocation, and it’s a complex one, simultaneously drawing on and disputing some of the tenets of second-wave feminism that Myles came of age with, and later rejected.¹ More recently, Myles has expanded on both this interest in the materiality of certain forms of embodiment, their own identity, and a more recognizably transfeminist approach to both, writing in the The Paris Review:

I’m queer, and most recently I’m thinking of myself as a they feminist. I was formerly a they lesbian wanting to suture the two groups dykes and transwomen in particular since there’s a growing sense in the trans community that lesbians and trans women are in opposition and I just don’t think it’s true. But I’m becoming more interested in attaching my transness to my feminism not my female body. I think the female body is every body’s business. (“Oath”)

Myles’ gender, then, is not discussed here as tired biographical detail, or as pop-cultural gossip, but as part of a wider scholarly project of accounting for gender flux and trans identity across a lifetime of work that engages with such ideas both obliquely and explicitly.

There is also a methodological question at play. This is not simply an issue of best practice and the necessity of citing and referring to writers’ work across their career according to their current names and pronouns.² Myles and their work present – perhaps unsurprisingly – a more complex and particular problem. In many ways, Myles’ gender is ultimately less relevant than the gender(s) of “Eileen Myles”: the multiplicity and variousness of gender as performed and interrogated throughout their oeuvre. The longevity, prolificity, and autobiographical/autofictive nature of their career requires us to consider carefully the way in which Myles records and performs a range of identity positions within their work – including those of the character “Eileen Myles.” For instance, in Afterglow, the jacket of which uses they/them pronouns in Myles’ biographical note, Myles takes up residence in the voice of their beloved late dog, Rosie, who refers to them according to her own doggy-style rules: “I called her Jethro. That was my name for her” (32). Would it be appropriate to accuse Myles-as-Eileen-as-Rosie-the-dog (who is also Myles’ late father, returning to them in a new form) of misgendering Eileen Myles (or “Eileen Myles”), or would it be more wise to simply accept the dizzying disjuncture between character and author, even when they bear the same name?

In Chelsea Girls and Inferno, it is perhaps easier to make the distinction between Eileen Myles the author and “Eileen Myles” the character, who defiantly scrawls her all-caps name in the sand after a sexual assault, declaring “Yes, that’s who I am” (Chelsea Girls 184). This “Eileen Myles,” whilst we understand her to be formed – at least in part – by the memories and experiences of Eileen Myles the writer, is a fixed construct in a way that the living person cannot be. She is limned by the bounds of the text, existing in a continuous present that is always already in the past – written, finished. She exists in another timeline, on another plane to the real-life Myles. To project the future of her creator back onto her would seem to undermine what Myles themself writes in the preface to the 2016 re-issue of Chelsea Girls by Serpent’s Tail – that they wanted to tell “the story of a ‘dyke,’ a one syllable word in a less complexly gendered time and I really wanted to tell her truth even before she was that” (xii). Elsewhere in the preface, Myles refers to “the person who wrote this book” before going on to ambiguously ask/state, “Who was she” (xii). Here their characteristically dry, flat tone invokes both a pronominal difference between themself and the book’s storyteller, and a sense of profound distance from this “she,” who is simultaneously past self and fictionalized protagonist.

In Afterglow, and perhaps even more so in Myles’ poetry, the distinctions between gender, genre and time are not so easily resolved. Afterglow’s central iconographic interest in foam reflects the book’s slippage between states of matter, in which fiction and memoir, imagined future, documented past, and alternative realities “are always frothing & coming right until the last minute” (95). Gender is foamy throughout; Myles writes that “gender makes excess especially when it’s unstable which it always is” (98). This excess is made manifest in a childhood scene with soap flakes in a backyard pool: “so we are playing in foam […] but we turned soap into hair. Did you do that – you know draping soap bubbles under our arms, on our chins and sideburns” (102–103). This literalized ability to mold and play with gender as a child will become, later, the malleable lyric “I” of Myles’ poems, where the frothing, soapy, slipperiness of gender and identity forces fixed categories to fall from the reader’s hands – a “shitty edifice” washed away in the foam (“Eileen Myles in Conversation with Maggie Nelson”).

By subtitling Afterglow “a dog memoir,” Myles makes clear the instability of the book’s genre; its dogginess is its foaminess – shifting, perspectival, alternating between subjectivities. It’s a dog memoir, something hybrid and told from an oblique, non-human angle, a recollection of Rosie’s life and yet also written, as is made abundantly clear, by Rosie, who tells a puppet talk show host, “I put it in her head. It’s what we always did. She feels she wrote it” (35). Indeed, she goes on to claim that “I wrote virtually every poem by Eileen Myles from 1990 to 2006 and she wrote nothing nothing in the intervening months, no years” (40). The knotty relationship between Rosie’s Jethro, “loping towards me with her big smile and a rope like it’s good news” (35), and “Eileen Myles,” whose poems Rosie has written for years, is one that Myles began gesturing to in 1994 in “The Lesbian Poet,” where they declare that “if I were to start unwriting myself, Eileen Myles, I would begin with my name. That’s the title of the poem, I own her” (129).

While Myles’s more recent commentaries on gender speak to the fallibility and situatedness of the present, other aspects of their life and work, including their sobriety, also light upon a particular relationship to nowness. “Yet, who am I now? I wondered,” they wrote in “Coming Clear,” a 1999 essay on sobriety for Out magazine. This shift in identity was comprised, Myles found, in a successive series of present moments; what being sober “means,” they write, is “days and days of life,” a recalibration of one’s relationship to the everyday, “doing all sorts of tedious things that no upstanding addict ever wanted to live to do – flossing, for instance.” Myles’s account of sober time speaks, intentionally or not, to the centrality of the present tense in addiction literature, the importance of the “one day at a time” and “just for today” mantras in AA’s 12-step programme, for example. But it also illuminates something about their poetics more generally. The tension between what “made them want to drink” in the first place, “the pressure of time and imperfection and the body,” which “always wants to have sex or run away or do something to wreck things,” and the “other things” sobriety attuned them to, like “look[ing] at the sky,” tending to “read several books at once,” and “thinking again about water” and the “way it moves and all the colors it holds at once.” Pleasure in Myles’ writing frequently emerges from this interplay of drives; the potential chaos of desire and interiority, mediated by everyday phenomena observed or aestheticised in the act of noticing.

If sobriety, as Myles suggests, figures a particular kind of relationship to the phenomenal world, their involvement with Buddhism can be seen as an extension of this relationship. In their 2009 “Welcome Aboard,” which recounts a silent group meditation they once participated in, Myles describes themself as a “partial Buddhist,” and there are other mentions of collective meditative practices in their work. In a 2012 interview with CAConrad for BOMB magazine, for example, they remember taking part in a street retreat in which “groups of people, Buddhists, would live on the streets for periods of time.” (“Eileen Myles: My Need to Say”). Accompanying the power and the intimacy of this temporary experience of homelessness was the feeling that they “were imposing, unwanted, even violating,” a self-critique that also throws into relief the fact that stillness is most vivid in Myles’ work not as a collective experiment, but as a state of creative solitude. A paradoxical one, too: as they put it in “Welcome Aboard,” they are a poet who writes poems “racing towards stillness”; poems that may emerge from a meditative place but also come to figure mutability and transience. There is, for example, “Sweet Heart,” where the declaration “I’m really/feeling it/now,” is both a joyful affirmation of pleasure and acknowledgment of impermanence (Evolution 215). An earlier ars poetica, the poem “Writing” (I Must Be Living 234), follows the bombastic declaration of self-belief – “I can/connect // any two/things // that’s/god” with a sense of volatility – “sometimes/I can’t/bear/my thoughts // sometimes/I can’t/do anything” – before coming to a typically Mylesian resolution:

but that’sokaybandaid book god that’s right

Myles’ work thus asks its readers to be present and notice the “constant movement” of time. As they put it in For Now, their most recent book at the time of writing:

I have been arming myself with philosophies for years that support the notion that the point is to be here, to be present which I think is the truly hard part, and yet I keep coming back to it, it’s undeniably true and writing it turns out is the easiest way to copy that feeling. (2)

Whichever metaphor you prefer to describe this process – text as snapshot or text as monument – Myles has long cultivated a self-reflexive poetics based upon such a principle, wherein writing is both an act of pausing and a mode of attention, a way of being attuned to the “now” of composition.

For Now and Myles’ conversation with Nelson are apt examples of certain nows, in that both are written texts adapted from speech, live utterances spoken in a particular time and place. The interview with Nelson, which was recorded in May 2022 and transcribed for publication in this issue, touches upon contemporary concerns and contains everyday details: a dog barking in the background; the exchange about The New York Times piece, and a reflection on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic upon their creative practices. For Now, on the other hand, is the written version of a lecture Myles gave at Yale University before the pandemic, in September 2019, on the occasion of the annual Windham-Campbell Prize ceremony, at a time when their future in their East Village apartment, their home for over forty years and a mainstay in their work, looked uncertain.

The survey, that act of taking stock or assessing the state of the field, is always in some way a snapshot of a moment in time; in the case of “Eileen Myles Now,” it is an extended period of time between two summers, 2021–2022, when the articles, reviews and creative contributions were being brought together and edited. Each of them also sheds light, in different ways, upon this centrality of the “now” to Myles’s work. Nick Sturm’s ““I’ve never liked mimeo”: Eileen Myles, Little Magazines, and the “Umpteenth-Generation New York School,” is one of two articles in the issue on Myles’s editing of the magazine dodgems in the 1970s. Sturm’s analysis of Myles’s editorial hand – their use of xerox rather than mimeo, their bicoastal dialogs with Dennis Cooper in Los Angeles – sheds light on the potential of small magazine culture to upend and subvert the conventional modes of literary dissemination. But dodgems also, Sturm argues, provides a model for thinking against the abstractions of generational formations, of the kind that would too comfortably, and normatively, position Myles as a second or a third generation New York School poet, as opposed to one with multiple, shifting affiliations as a queer, trans and punk writer. Sturm’s riposte to generational thinking intervenes in the narratives we tell about the literary past and thus, in turn, the present, which is to say that how we think of Myles’s work then affects where we position it now. Stephanie Anderson’s article, “Shiny Collisions: Editing as Serious Humor in dodgems,” locates the humor in Myles’s editorial practice, where the curation of different texts, documents and images is also a form of gleeful collision, referred to by the magazine’s title. Aggression is figured in this context as a way of thinking about the group dynamics of artistic circles, animated as they are not only by harmony and collaboration, but by gossip and slights. Much of the humor that arises from these literary and editorial clashes, Anderson argues, is a product of the “aleatory happenstance” of the magazine’s composition, which suggests too how the small magazine form might be uniquely attuned to the “now” of a given cultural moment, with its irreverent blend of the aleatory and the intentional.

Other articles in this issue examine the place of crises both personal and political in Myles’s work. In his article “Driving and Catastrophe with Eileen Myles,” Joel Duncan identifies how the anxious now of the climate crisis frames and impacts upon some of Myles’ recent work, both their 2012 collection Snowflake/different streets and their 2019 short road movie The Trip. In particular, Duncan focuses on Myles’ representations of driving, which is at once an everyday staple of petromodernity, whose real effects on the environment are self-evident, and an ambivalent creative act, one that provides the poet with space to reflect upon, and sit with, the contradictions of living in an age of climate change. The car, like the camera, is a compositional technology for Myles, part of crafting a cyborg poem that relies on destroying the planet, a problem which the poems address by virtue of what Duncan calls Myles’s “trans* ecopoetics.” In The Trip Myles crafts a zany polemic addressing the ways that white mobility relies on the immobilization of black and brown bodies.

Matthew Holman’s article “Class, Crisis, and The Commons in Eileen Myles’s Late Work” examines how some of Myles’ recent political commitments – the legacies of the Occupy movement, critiquing Russian intervention in the 2016 U.S. election – are expressed through lyric address in Evolution (2018), their most recent poetry collection at the time of writing. The lyric is politicized in Myles’ work as a mode of writing and speaking that raises awareness and inspires action, and one that also incorporates, or interpolates, non-poetic material such as protest letters and social media posts. Myles’s active and visible presence on social media, Holman suggests, becomes an extension of their poetics, as illustrated by their more recent output on the East River Park development. The particular utility of the Instagram post in their work also gives a literal (albeit digital) frame to the notion of the lyric as the snapshot of a moment, and to the nowness of Myles’ political writing. Additionally, our inclusion in this issue of a review of Eleanor Perry’s monograph Radical Elegies: White Violence, Patriarchy and Necropoetics (Bloomsbury, 2022), by Elliot Mason, speaks to our desire to situate Myles’ work in relation to bodies of work that engage with both contemporary political issues and poetic histories, while resisting genealogical frames. As previously outlined, Gina Gwenffrewi’s review of We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (2020) speaks to the contemporary canon of trans writing to which Myles’ work also belongs.

Seen from various angles, then, the “now” is perhaps one of Myles’ great subjects, a constellation of the experiences, aesthetic principles and political commitments that inform their work over time. A unit of time that is both deictic and inexact, eternally renewable and always already expiring, it provides a consistent figure in their poems for flux and the inconsistency of lived experience. In this way, their writing carries the torch of the rich and varied legacy of the present tense among New York School poets, who are so readily grouped together according to aesthetic maxims of improvisation, like O’Hara’s statement that “you just go on your nerve.” (O'Hara 498) That such trademark portraits of everyday moments by New York School writers, famous for their insouciance and incipience, are more often than not performances of compositional spontaneity, edited and revised for publication, is less an exposure of the ruse than a central challenge of writing itself; the “truly hard part.” Myles’ work in turn encourages us to envisage the present tense of reading as the place where temporalities meet. With Myles, one is simultaneously fully present in the now of their past – proudly sporting a maroon Madras shirt in 1960s Arlington; “cooking French toast for Jimmy Schuyler” (Chelsea Girls 254) in the Chelsea Hotel in 1979; the flashing views from a car somewhere between LA and San Diego (“peach!/peach!/peach!” (snowflake/different streets 29)); an eternal apartment in the East Village – and always already behind. After all, as Myles themself told Nelson only a little while ago in the interview for this issue, “I just want to run and screech into the present and future dark and write something new” (Myles, “Eileen Myles in Conversation with Maggie Nelson”). Here in the act of reading, to quote lines from CAConrad’s “for Eileen Myles,” we try not to be “nostalgic/for 80s music,” nor confine ourselves only to “thumbing through/calendars of the future,” but inhabit the “now” in all its complexity.

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ “Maybe this is my way of claiming a youth that is only aesthetically mine, but [in terms of] feminism, I am second-wave age, but I don’t identify at all second-wave feminist, I identify third-wave, because I felt like that’s when I really connected and had an active feminism and found artists that I was excited about, and in many cases they were twenty years younger than me.” (Interview with Rosa Campbell).

² Excellent work has been done on precisely this, by individual scholars such as Jonah Coman in his discursive piece on citation practices, by the Trans Journalists Association, and, indeed, by the Wikipedia editorial community, who have put together one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful style guides on sexual and gender identity available online.