{"id":129018,"date":"2018-09-05T09:00:26","date_gmt":"2018-09-05T13:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129018"},"modified":"2018-09-06T16:48:22","modified_gmt":"2018-09-06T20:48:22","slug":"trump-is-a-performance-artist-an-interview-with-eileen-myles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/05\/trump-is-a-performance-artist-an-interview-with-eileen-myles\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Is a Performance Artist: An Interview with Eileen Myles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Eileen Myles may be the closest thing we have to a celebrity poet. In part, Myles\u2019s stardom can be attributed to the award-winning television show <\/em>Transparent,<\/em>\u00a0in which a queer poet played by Cherry Jones is based on Myles. But while Myles\u2019s stint on television\u2014in addition to serving as poet-muse, Myles made a cameo on the show\u2014may help to explain their rise to a level of celebrity usually out of reach for even the most successful poets in America, Myles\u2019s stature has been decades in the making. In addition to producing more than twenty books, Myles famously ran a write-in campaign for presidency in 1992. Among their most cited poems is \u201cAn American Poem,\u201d in which Myles identifies as a Kennedy, one who forsook the wealth and comfort afforded by a famous, successful American family for a life of poverty and obscurity as a poet in New York. In real life, Myles grew up in an Irish Catholic blue-collar Boston family. Much of their work, including the legendary <\/em>Chelsea Girls, reflects on Myles\u2019s childhood and the poetry scene of New York in the seventies and eighties. The last few years have been especially prolific for Myles, whose new collection, <\/em>Evolution<\/a>, comes on the heels of last year\u2019s <\/em>Afterglow (a dog memoir),<\/em>\u00a0which had in turn followed another book of new and selected poems as well as a new edition of <\/em>Chelsea Girls.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve long admired Myles\u2019s work, and I taught their poems in a course on feminist poetry earlier this year. Current events and our political milieu made me especially keen to speak with them. We spoke over Zoom, a video-conferencing program\u2014Myles from their living space in Provincetown, where they were teaching, and I from the living room of my Stanford student-housing unit. Myles was totally present, forthright, and willing to engage with me but also pushed back more than once. When I asked about the intersection of poetry and politics, Myles responded, \u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d They forced me to reconsider not only how I was formulating my questions but what, in fact, was behind those questions in the first place.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Why don\u2019t we start with the title of your new book, Evolution<\/em><\/a>. What made you choose this title?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

The title is really simple. The first poem in the book is called \u201cEvolution.\u201d It\u2019s a long poem that has a lot do with what the book is doing, which is a certain way of approaching the unknown. I love the word evolution<\/em> because it holds a lot and is very uneven. Evolution doesn\u2019t come in a constant way. It comes in spurts. It could be that a lot happens in ten minutes, and then nothing happens for ten thousand years. I was in New York, and I had more free time than I usually had\u2014I didn\u2019t yet have a new dog. There was a quaking and interesting emptiness in my life. The poem took that space and asked questions about sanity and craziness and communication and neighborhood, really big general questions about life and existence.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In that title poem, there are several lines about going crazy or being crazy. For example, you write,<\/p>\n

My thighs.
\nI\u2019ve had you since
\nI was a kid.
\nI\u2019ve known you for so
\nlong. Even when
\nyou betrayed
\nme in the bathtub
\none night when
\nyou were rabbits
\nbut that\u2019s cause
\nI was going
\ncrazy. Is it crazy
\nto be the
\ncitizen who\u2019s
\nonly partially
\nhere \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What is craziness, and what does it mean to be \u201conly partially here\u201d?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

I think being partially here is a very contemporary condition. When I\u2019m talking to someone over a counter or on a technological platform, we\u2019re sort of connecting, but we\u2019re not in the same space\u2014it\u2019s a mysterious immediacy. When I wrote the part about thighs and rabbit ears in the bathtub, I was hearkening to a point in my early twenties when I felt like I was holding onto my sanity by a thread. Obviously, crazy<\/em> is the word men use whenever a woman says something they don\u2019t like. It\u2019s crazy! Is she crazy? You think she\u2019s crazy? I heard she\u2019s crazy! I was trying it on a bit, while also alluding to a moment when I felt I was going crazy. I was coming into existence, and that was scary. I think every time you transition in your life in a way that feels radical, it\u2019s a bit of a dance between craziness and evolution.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What or where is the here<\/em> of \u201cpartially here\u201d?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

Here<\/em> means connection. Here<\/em> is the most desperate and primary\u00a0word we have for marking a point, occupying it and holding onto it. We know what here means when we\u2019re there.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you think of yourself as a political poet? How do politics inform your work?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

I think adjectives are a little troubling, but I\u2019m not uncomfortable with dealing with politics in my work. Politics aren\u2019t anything I or anybody else successfully shies away from in their work. I mean, by not mentioning politics, you\u2019re doing something pretty clear.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

One of the highlights of this book is your presidential address, \u201cAcceptance Speech,\u201d written shortly before the 2016 election, in which you respond to Zoe Leonard\u2019s poem \u201cI want a president,\u201d which was itself written in response to your \u201cAn American Poem.\u201d In \u201cAcceptance Speech,\u201d you outline what I take to be your Utopian vision for the world\u2014or at least for this country. There\u2019s a department for women, a massively increased NEA budget, and many programs to encourage people to appreciate their surroundings. Education would be free. Cars would be banned. There would be free food. Obviously, we\u2019re very, very far from this now. What do you think poetry offers us, particularly at this moment, given what\u2019s going on in this country today?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

It always offers the same thing\u2014an opportune space to list things in an order that makes sense to you. Poetry is this kind of speech or statement that plays by its own deck. You can change the order. You can change the look of it on the page. You can use the right words, the wrong words. You can use English words. You can use words from other languages. You can appropriate languages. It is a Utopian space in which to express. Poetry is structured like music\u2014through gaps. But it\u2019s language, and I think that\u2019s part of what\u2019s upsetting to people who feel intimidated by it. They know what language does, and now it\u2019s doing something else. It\u2019s also kind of the opposite right now. Because the world is pretty scary and because of the way we use Twitter or Instagram or texting, the ways that language is compressing and expanding and occupying space are very different from how they were twenty years ago. Poetry has always resembled that, so it\u2019s easy for poetry to be a comfortable space right now. But if you\u2019re simply concerned with already knowing, you may not want to know what poetry knows.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What does poetry know?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no answer to that. It\u2019s like all the ways of knowing. Each poem is a piece of information and communication of sorts. The point is that I think the form of it is always different, and that\u2019s what\u2019s destabilizing.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How do you see poetry as potentially being a political intervention?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

My work is that answer. They\u2019re made of the same stuff. Politics is discourse. Donald Trump, to my mind, is a certain kind of performance artist who thrives on impact and confusion and destabilization. I can\u2019t help seeing him as sort of a frustrated artist, with those same tools brought to a different use.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There is a historical affinity between prophecy and poetry. Do you think poetry is a form of prophecy? Do you see yourself as a kind of prophet?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

I think language is prophetic. It\u2019s just like the I Ching. It\u2019s just like the horoscope. It\u2019s just like every kind of divination. It becomes a space that\u2019s really alive, and it starts to tell you things. Language is the prophet, and I happen to be a human being who uses language regularly, and so I know stuff because of my practice of drawing my words down.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How do the words come to you? Where do they come from?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t make up any words. I use the words that are in the world. I think we all have incredible capacities to be prophetic, to be deeply sensitive and aware. I\u2019m a thinking animal, and for me, language is the material. I like making arrangements. It all seems magical to me, kind of chemical and even alchemical. I always think about the Beatles in that they weren\u2019t exceptional musicians, they were just kind of okay, they were sort of good enough, and yet them coming together was an astonishing thing. Every time that happens, whether it\u2019s a theater troupe or people falling in love or a poem coming into being, it\u2019s like, What the fuck is that?<\/p>\n

When I taught at the University of California San Diego, I taught a class called Distributing Literature. I made it into a real workshop\u2014people in the class were asked to invent a new method for getting poetry into the world. Two women in the class took a terrific short lyric poem by Michael McClure. They put the words on refrigerator magnets, and they had a kind of flat palette, and they went around the campus and found people who worked on the campus, in janitorial, in the cafeteria, in tech, everybody other than students and teachers. They said, Would you make a poem out of these words? What they showed was that one perfect little poem contains so many other variations. I found it an unforgettable realization that nothing ever really lands, nothing is ever really fixed. It\u2019s kind of a beautiful accident each time. I feel like that\u2019s the business I\u2019m in, and that\u2019s what excites me about poetry.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You work across genres. Do you have a preferred genre? How do you feel about genre categories altogether?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

I have very little respect for them. It\u2019s like gender\u2014it’s much blurrier, and things are always entering into other containers. Poetry is the first genre I was competent in and the first thing I could realize, so I give everything to poetry and describe myself as a poet. When I was inventing myself as a writer, I would read biographies and have ideas about writers. If a writer was also a literature critic, then I wanted to be a critic, too, and if a writer wrote a libretto, then I would write a libretto, and if I saw that you get drawn into Hollywood, then I wanted that to happen to me. You write a novel\u2014you get a house, it seems. I wanted to get a house, and I wanted to write a novel. I wanted to be a bourgeois writer. Part of my understanding of being a writer was that I thought all these other ambitions were intrinsic to it. Also, I\u2019m kind of restless. If I\u2019m writing a novel, it seems like a very good time to write a poem, and if I\u2019m supposed to be writing an essay and I have a deadline, then I\u2019ll start thinking of the first line in a story. This came out of avoiding reality, in a certain way. I\u2019d have a crummy part-time job, and I\u2019d be writing a poem on my counter, or I\u2019d be writing poems in class in college, listening to people talk and taking down language. It was always stolen time and always a secret practice.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What about the categories of fiction and nonfiction? It seems in your work that the two bleed into each other regularly. Are you writing yourself into your work? Are the poems in Evolution<\/em> about Eileen Myles?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

I have all the information about Eileen Myles, so why not use what I\u2019ve got? But I\u2019m a fiction like everything else. I didn\u2019t write my name. I didn\u2019t choose my family. I could be writing and thinking I\u2019m making something up, and then I think, Oh no, it\u2019s actually true. I think I\u2019m making a joke, and then I think it\u2019s actually the truest thing I\u2019ve written in twenty-five pages. Genres are suspect, and fiction and nonfiction\u2014what\u2019s the difference?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

To return to politics and poetry, what are your thoughts on protest poetry? Do you want to produce poems that are used in that way or not?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

Well, I do. I do. Again, adjectives like protest<\/em> poetry<\/em> always bug me. Poetry protests! When I came to New York in the seventies, it was right after a moment when people were writing poems protesting the Vietnam War. But when I got to New York, it seemed like a much more aestheticized moment. There was a lot of dismissal of feminist poetry. The world I was in was very experimental, New York School and Beat and Black Mountain, and then proto-Language was like, Don\u2019t go there, and, Write work that\u2019s about something. Honestly, I was very excited by the work that I was reading. There were women whose work was important to me, but by and large, I was reading guys, and I was influenced by their work. A lot of the so-called feminist poets seemed more academic, a different aesthetic. I knew I wanted to be where I was, and so for me, my project then was to occupy what was essentially a white- or sometimes black-male aesthetic, with female context and a female body and female objections to those traditions. There\u2019s a way in which my work was always inhabiting and protesting\u00a0at the same time.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Coming back to Evolution<\/em>,\u00a0I wanted to ask you about the poem \u201cA Gift for You.\u201d I love the images in this piece, humility as a \u201cdeflated \/ beach ball \/ on a tiny \/ chair\u201d and \u201cthe calm \/ person writing \/ her calm poems\u201d who \u201copens \/ her chest & \/ a monkey \/ god \/ is taking \/ a shit \/ swinging \/ on his \/ thing.\u201d There\u2019s so much here. Can you tell me a bit about this poem? Who\u2019s the calm person, and what\u2019s the monkey god doing in her chest?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

Sometimes, when I\u2019m writing a poem, it\u2019s like I\u2019m dying. I\u2019m so fucking calm, it\u2019s like I\u2019m marching to my own execution. I\u2019m jittery, jittery, and then I get a line, and I can feel that there\u2019s so much behind that line. I start writing the poem, and suddenly, I\u2019m in the spell. I write poems because nothing feels as good as writing poems, and so I\u2019m the calm person writing her calm poem, and a part of me is in there, a part of me is outside looking at that person, and suddenly, I want to show my passionate burning insides, and I want to be the monkey god, and I want to upset you. I went to India in 1990, and for a time, there was this monkey with the heart torn open over my desk. I haven\u2019t seen it in years. As in filmmaking, there are visual puns that get you from one scene to another, and it\u2019s like that deflated balloon sitting on the chair\u2014it was auditioning for a poem, though I didn\u2019t know that!<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Who do you generally write for?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

Sometimes it\u2019s just language, and I\u2019m just listing things and waiting for something to kick in. And sometimes I\u2019m full of feeling, and on some level, it\u2019s probably a message, though I may not know who the message is being directed to or when they will come into the poem. I think writing is talking to yourself too. One of the last poems in the book has the line \u201cI don\u2019t even think my thoughts you do\u201d because I know I\u2019m infecting your brain with my thoughts. I\u2019m unloading.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Who are you reading today? Which poets or writers do you find most interesting and important?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

I just finished Nightwood<\/em>, by Djuna Barnes, which I hadn\u2019t read since my twenties or thirties. It\u2019s such a masterpiece. I still think it\u2019s one of the most perfect pieces of prose ever written. I\u2019m reading poets like CAConrad, Simone White, and Renee Gladman, who is a fiction writer who travels with poets. Her work is very important to me. My friend Adam Fitzgerald wrote a book called George Washington<\/em> a few years ago. I\u2019m reading a galley called Mother Winter<\/em>, by Sophia Shalmiyev. Leni Zumas\u2019s\u00a0Red Clocks<\/em> was one of the exciting books recently. Andrea Lawlor\u2019s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl<\/em> is an incredible novel. There’s so much amazing work right now.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Back to Evolution<\/em>.\u00a0Do you have a favorite poem in this book?<\/p>\n

MYLES<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Baby.\u201d<\/p>\n

The baby
\nsays to the old
\nman let\u2019s
\nhave a cup
\nof coffee
\nthe old
\nman says now
\nyou\u2019re talking.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Shoshana Olidort is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in the <\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, the<\/em> Chicago Tribune, the<\/em> Times Literary Supplement,<\/em> and the <\/em>Jewish Review of Books, among other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Eileen Myles may be the closest thing we have to a celebrity poet. In part, Myles\u2019s stardom can be attributed to the award-winning television show Transparent,\u00a0in which a queer poet played by Cherry Jones is based on Myles. But while Myles\u2019s stint on television\u2014in addition to serving as poet-muse, Myles made a cameo on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1585,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[36540,36541,15776,36534,36536,12544,6479,1716,4655,30987,36542,36532,34524,36538,22336,36535,4617,36533,8695,36537,36539,19085],"class_list":["post-129018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-a-gift-for-you","tag-acceptance-speech","tag-adam-fitzgerald","tag-andrea-lawlor","tag-ca-conrad","tag-chelsea-girls","tag-djuna-barnes","tag-evolution","tag-george-washington","tag-i-ching","tag-i-want-a-dyke-for-president","tag-leni-zumas","tag-michael-mcclure","tag-mother-winter","tag-nightwood","tag-paul-takes-the-form-of-a-mortal-girl","tag-protest","tag-red-clocks","tag-renee-gladman","tag-simon-white","tag-sophia-shalmiyev","tag-zoe-leonard"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTrump Is a Performance Artist: An Interview with Eileen Myles<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Eileen Myles on going crazy, poetry as prophecy, and the blurry lines between genres and genders.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/05\/trump-is-a-performance-artist-an-interview-with-eileen-myles\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump Is a Performance Artist: An Interview with Eileen Myles by Shoshana Olidort\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 5, 2018 \u2013   Eileen Myles may be the closest thing we have to a celebrity poet. 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