Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 9, 1949,[5][6] to a family with a working-class background.[7] They attended Catholic schools in Arlington, Massachusetts, and graduated from UMass Boston in 1971.[8]

Myles moved to New York City in 1974 with the intention of becoming a poet.[6] In New York they participated in writing workshops held at St. Mark's Poetry Project, which promoted the idea of the "working artist."[9] There they studied with Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Paul Violi, and Bill Zavatsky,[6] and were given a template for creating art in the context of community. There, Myles first met the poet Allen Ginsberg, whom they admired and who became the subject of several of their poems and essays.[10][11] In 1979 they worked as an assistant to the poet James Schuyler.[8]

In 1984 Myles was hired as the artistic director of St. Mark's Poetry Project,[8] which, they have stated, gave them the opportunity to rethink the institution that influenced their early work. During Reagan's presidency, 1981–1988, Myles dealt with the cuts to the NEA art budget[12] and focused their energies on broadening the aesthetic and cultural range of the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Myles' leadership of the Project represented a generational shift away from the church's base, which until then been run by the second generation members of the New York School.[13] Program Coordinators in this period were Patricia Spears Jones, and Jessica Hagedorn, and Myles invited Alice Notley and Dennis Cooper to teach.[14] Charles Bernstein ran the lecture series, Chris Kraus, Marc Nasdor, and Richard Elovich coordinated performance, Tim Dlugos and James Ruggia edited the Newsletter. During Myles tenure at St. Mark's, Myles performed their now well-known poem "An American Poem" for the first time at P.S. 122.

In 1991–1992 Myles conducted an "openly female" write-in campaign for the office of President of the United States[15] from the East Village that spiraled into a project of national interest. Part performance art, part protest,[16] this gesture was meant to offer an alternative glimpse into what progressive, radical, and socially committed politics could look like. [17] Zoe Leonard's 1992 poem, "I want a president", which begins with the line: "I want a dyke for president", was written to celebrate Myles's presidential run.[18]

Beginning in 2002, Myles began a five-year stint as a Professor of Writing at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).[2] UCSD funded the research and travel grant that enabled the creation of Inferno (2010), as well as Hell, an opera composed by Michael Webster, for which Myles wrote the libretto.[19] Since leaving UCSD in 2007, Myles has been a Visiting Writer at Bard College, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, Washington University, University of Montana-Missoula,[2] Columbia's School of the Arts, and New York University.[8]

In 2016, Myles endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in a BuzzFeed piece entitled Hillary Clinton: The Leader You Want When The World Ends.[20] Myles was also approached by Clinton's campaign to write a poem, as part of "Artists for Hillary", a mostly-female group which included Jenny Holzer and Maya Lin, whose creative statements were testament to their support for Clinton's presidential bid.[21] Myles's poem was entitled MOMENTUM 2016.[22]

By their own account, Myles moved from Boston to New York in 1974 "to be a poet,"[6] where they became associated with a group of poets at St. Mark's Poetry Project.[23]^:184 Myles's first book, The Irony of the Leash, was published by Jim Brodey from the St. Mark's Poetry Project in 1978.[24]

In 1977 and 1979, Myles published issues of dodgems, a literary magazine, a title referring, in the vernacular of Great Britain, to bumper cars,[25] specifically those of Revere Beach, MA. The title is said to serve as a metonym for the collision of aesthetic differences that characterized the poetry scene of that time. The dodgems issues featured poems by John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Charles Bernstein, as well as a letter from Lily Tomlin and an angry note from a neighbor; both issues are referenced in the book, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side—Adventures in Writing: 1960–1980, (which also describes St. Mark's),[23] and were exhibited in vitrines in the Library's 1998 show on the same subject.

Myles's next collection, A Fresh Young Voice From the Plains (1981), earned their first major review, by Jane Bosveld in Ms..[26] Not Me (1991) is Myles's most popular collection of poetry. It contains Myles work, "An American Poem,"[27] in which they fictionalize their identity and claims to be a "Kennedy", and comfortably addresses politics in the work. They first performed the work at P.S. 122 in New York City, during their tenure at St. Mark's. Since then "An American Poem" has been filmed and shown in film festivals all over the world, screening in New York and other major cities. It has been included, in translation, in German, Russian, and Italian anthologies of American writing. The trajectory of "An American Poem" is documented in Myles's novel Inferno (2010).

Myles produced Maxfield Parrish/early and new poems (1995), a collection of both new and selected poems on the theme of the surreality of sex.[28] In the same year, Myles co-edited The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading (1995) with Liz Kotz, which is described as having a multi-genre approach and postmodern focus on reading rather than identity, and which is said to have offered something different from mainstream gay and lesbian poetry anthologies of the 1990s. Soon after, School of Fish (1997) appeared, the first work wherein Myles's dog, Rosie is featured, where Rosie served as a second camera in the poem's field of vision.

Myles published Skies (2000), a project begun in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the poet described the sky becoming "a new character in my life."[29] The book is framed by a transcript of a panel at The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts featuring Helen Miranda Wilson, Frances Richard, John Kelly, Molly Benjamin, and Jack Pierson, who each spoke about their own relation to the sky. On My Way (2001) concludes with an essay about speech and class, "The End of New England."[30]

Snowflake / Different Streets (2012) uses the technique of dos-à-dos binding to combine two distinct collections of poetry in the same physical book.[31] As Ian Bodkin writes in his review of the work, Myles' poems "navigat[e] the ever-insular landscape of our technological culture that invades moments of quiet thought" in Snowflake, then "offers a sense of return to the people and places of intimacy, connections that bring her back to this world" in different streets.[32]

Though Myles's primary intention was to be a poet, they have stated that they were also moved by the New Journalism of the sixties and seventies and the art writing tradition by poets of the New York School. In the 1980s, Myles began to publish personal journalism, book reviews, and art reviews. Early columns appeared in the Poetry Project Newsletter; their essay "I Hate Mimeo" called for an end to the same publishing format in which their essay appeared.[33] In the 1990s they wrote a monthly column in Paper Magazine.

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

In 2006 Myles received an Warhol/Creative Capital grant, which funded their first collection of nonfiction, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009).[34] The title essay from this collection, "Iceland," has been described as part travel essay, part personal essay, and part inquiry into the nature of how landscape and writing affect each other.

Myles's first collection of stories, Chelsea Girls (1994) features "Bread and Water," the oldest story in the collection, and an account of life in the East Village in the late 1970s and early 1980s.[35] Raymond Foye called it "The quintessential memoir of the Lower East Side."[36] In an interview with Michael Hafford, Myles stated that "Bread and Water" "was literally like a copy of my life at that moment."[37] In "Chelsea Girls," the title story, Myles chronicles their time as the assistant to poet James Schuyler in the Chelsea Hotel; their intergenerational exchange has been the subject of scholarship by Dianne Chisholm and José Esteban Muñoz.[38][39]

Myles's second full-length work, Cool for You: a nonfiction novel (2000) catalogs abject institutional spaces of an "insider," in opposition to the male artist as an "outsider."[40] Among these spaces are school, family, and various bad jobs; the extreme insider of the book is Myles's maternal grandmother Nellie Riordan Myles, who spent the last 17 years of her life in a state mental hospital in Massachusetts. Also included in Cool for You 's inventory is an imaginary one—a chapter that describes the solar system from the perspective of a ten-year-old version of Myles themself, Myles's first foray into fantasy writing. Cool for You received widespread recognition and was reviewed in The New York Times[41] and The Nation.[42]

Inferno (a poet's novel) (2010) fictionalizes the life of a poet very similar to Myles, and Myles stated in an interview with John Oakes that the vernacular language of Dante's "The Inferno" is their "biggest argument for the way I write."[43] It was awarded a 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.[44] On September 29, 2015, HarperCollins reissued Myles's out-of-print novel, Chelsea Girls.[45]