Eileen Myles, a ‘Working Life’

 

The sky hates me
I must be calm
I must be calm
if I have any
chance of good
            ness

at all
a child in
a snowstorm
a man faces
death
slow (“Love Song”)

I’m working my way through the latest poetry collection by New York poet Eileen Myles, a “Working Life” (New York NY: Grove Press, 2023) [see my review of Myles’ selected poems here; and of a prior poetry collection here], a collection that offers, to open the “Acknowledgments”: “I wanted to say a ‘Working Life’ means the poems are the plan, not that this book is about labor exactly.” “That’s not a new thought / & every single thing u / Built is a perch,” Myles writes, to open the short poem “Painting Is the Sky.” A life lived through writing, as the legendary Myles continues their exploration across first-person directness—the clarity of a straightforward lyric that is rich in complexity—offering writing not a means to an end but a means of methodology and function: to write one’s way into being. “It is the first / day of the new / Year. The city honors / This day by not / Requiring us / To move our / Cars.” (“Pigs”)

Across a “working life,” Myles is the intellectual flaneur, writing of groceries, libraries, love and planets, building lobbys and blades of grass; a city poet since famously arriving in New York from Boston back in 1974, landing directly in with elements of the New York School and street-level punk poets. One can see echoes of the intimate directness and documentary through language of NewYork School poets Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley, as well as elements of the diaristic walking and thinking “I did this, I did that” lyrics of Stacy Szymaszek and Frank O’Hara, and the electrified language and intimate propulsion of Kathy Acker. “The poetry / of accident / haunts / like a circus / tent over / my days,” they write, as part of “March 3,” “and that / fades / and a new / one. I / begin to / write / about dying.”

If you are interested in Myles’ work, I would also highly recommend James Yeh’s stunning interview with Myles in a recent issue of The Believer (Vol. 21, No. 2; Summer 2024). The interview is incredibly rich, as Myles offers their own knowledge based on skill, experience, and too much to repeat here:

I just think it’s repetition. It’s like anything. It’s really similar to how you know if a poem is good. You know because you’ve just been there and you’ve been repeating and repeating. For some reason lately I’m freaky on repetition as a value. Because everything that’s good, you’ve done it again and again and again and it becomes your friend and it becomes your turf and it becomes your nest and then it’s just the right place to be and the right way to be.

How to not only figure out how best to write but how best you should be writing. This is, after all, an important distinction, and one not everyone seems to have figured out. It took me close to a decade of active prose writing before I came to that same conclusion: not how I thought a novel should be written, but how best to write a novel in my own way. Give out all your tools, I say. A bit further on in the same answer, as Myles offers:

You kind of make your own nest, that’s the thing.