{"id":48383,"date":"2013-03-14T10:29:59","date_gmt":"2013-03-14T14:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=48383"},"modified":"2013-03-14T10:59:06","modified_gmt":"2013-03-14T14:59:06","slug":"marks-on-paper-eileen-myles-chelsea-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/03\/14\/marks-on-paper-eileen-myles-chelsea-girls\/","title":{"rendered":"Marks on Paper: Eileen Myles\u2019s Chelsea Girls<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"415PRDx7MGL._SL500_SS500_\"<\/a>At Bluestocking Books, my favorite indie bookstore in Hillcrest, San Diego, I pick up a glorious-looking object. The cover is textured, beige with a blue inside flap\u2014a look typical of the publisher Black Sparrow Press. On the front is a painting by Nicole Eisenman of twenty women in a brawl, or having sex, or both. All over the cover and among the cream pages are hand-scrawled notes. It looks like a literature student once owned the book. Probably someone studying creative writing. Probably someone at UCSD. I hold up the paperback to the woman behind the register, and ask, \u201cWhat is this?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s Eileen Myles. She\u2019s a lesbian poet. She\u2019s amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

That day I read the entire thing. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t force a story that doesn\u2019t want to be told.\u201d This is the first line in \u201c1969,\u201d an essay in Myles\u2019s collection Chelsea Girls<\/em>. Published in 1994, the book is a nonfiction novel, or a fictional nonfiction, a K\u00fcnstlerroman<\/em> (\u201cartists\u2019 novel\u201d) about a young woman, named Eileen Myles, who is from Arlington, Massachusetts. She is a poet, and she likes women but \u201cdidn\u2019t know there was anything you could do with those feelings.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first thing I noted about Myles was that her voice on the page reads like she is reading to me. She was reading to me that day in San Diego, sitting on my Craigslist couch with grad-school applications laid out on the floor across the room, about to go study creative nonfiction, whatever that meant. Chelsea Girls<\/em> is a book of prose that reads like memoir and is called fiction. I didn\u2019t know this at the time. I thought it was all true, all about Myles, and in a big way I still think so.<\/p>\n

The essays jump around thematically and sequentially, beginning in a gay bar in Augusta, Maine, where Myles tackles a police officer: \u201cI\u2019m a poet, you fools, you asshole cops!\u201d She describes New York in the eighties, taking the F train to Queens to collect her \u201clight blue pills,\u201d which she would buy for thirty-five dollars and sell for a hundred: \u201cGo someplace out of your life, come back new, bring it around and make a little money. Clean your apartment. Write some.\u201d Myles has a boyfriend: \u201cI thought we looked alike \u2026 \u2018Is that all,\u2019 I asked as his dick \u2018entered\u2019 me. That\u2019s all I\u2019ve got, he said.\u201d She has a girlfriend: \u201cThe first woman put her head between my legs and the complete sin, the absolute moment of sex came back and I was all in one piece coming apart. I was willing to sacrifice all for that moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

She publishes a book of poetry, A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains<\/em> (1981), and throws a party at her publisher\u2019s loft, where\u00a0her friends found her discomfort amusing: \u201cHow\u2019re you doing, Eileen? [Ted] put this faggy little turn on \u2018Eileen,\u2019 like it was a made-up name, something I\u2019m pretending to be. It sounded right.\u201d She works at Little, Brown in Boston, a position \u201cunderpaid but prestigious,\u201d sneaking poems on her electric typewriter. She lives in the East Village on $250 a month, and friends offer her drinks, drugs, and cigarettes, but she is too embarrassed to ask for a steak: \u201cI was thirty-one years old and it was too humiliating to admit I wanted food.\u201d<\/p>\n

She attends a kid\u2019s birthday party and realizes she is the only adult who expects to get fed: \u201cKids\u2019 parties were a spectator sport, and that any real adult would have known to eat before they came.\u201d She recounts her sexual escapades to Jimmy Schuyler, her part-time employer in the Chelsea Hotel who paid her to make him French toast. How she has sex with women who are cruel, who are younger, who are involved with other people. How having an affair is \u201ca gorgeous grey feeling.\u201d She recounts what it\u2019s like to have sex with another Catholic: \u201cI loved the moment when Mary said should we go to a hotel. She kind of snickered like a dirty girl. I was glad I was not with a complete sophisticate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eileen is a mess, Chelsea Girls<\/em> is a mess, and I was a mess when I read it. My writing meaning nothing and everything: \u201cWet words on soft limp paper. Holy Holy Holy.\u201d I loved every one of Myles\u2019s sentences; I couldn\u2019t get enough. I could be like her, this fictional nonfiction character\u2014this mild sort of fuckup\u2014if I wanted to be. \u201cThere would be such a future because something would happen to me. Soon. I was sure of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rumpus<\/em> interview with Eileen Myles, April 28, 2011:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a little hard, because I don\u2019t want to be stuck, I don\u2019t want to give the copyright to someone that I\u2019m uncomfortable with. So a number of people have asked to publish Chelsea Girls<\/em>, and what I keep waiting for is a publisher that I\u2019m excited about. That was the plan with this book Inferno: A Poet\u2019s Novel<\/em>, but I\u2019m always too weird. With fiction I\u2019ve always had agents who are always like, \u2018Of course you\u2019ll be able to sell this book!\u2019 And then people are so weird about my work. With Chelsea Girls<\/em> it was like, \u2018These stories just kinda crumble, they don\u2019t, you know \u2026 arc.\u2019 Or, \u2018They kind of deteriorate.\u2019 And I was like, Yes! Yes. I\u2019ve had a few editors in the mainstream who have been interested. They\u2019ll say to me\u2014and this is even in the nineties when I had published a lot of books\u2014they\u2019d say, \u2018We\u2019ll have to work very closely with you because it\u2019s a first book.\u2019 It\u2019s like, you\u2019re kidding. So what I felt time and again is what I\u2019m being told is they\u2019re going to help me fix my work. Fix that bad English. Make those stories pop at the end.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

\u201cWhich way is St. Mark\u2019s Bookshop?\u201d<\/p>\n

I had moved to New York two weeks before for grad school. I was living in South Slope, which was superbly different from San Diego, and I wanted to be a writer. I held Chelsea Girls <\/em>in my hand as I crossed Second Avenue. In the back of the book is a picture of Myles taken by Robert Mapplethorpe in the early eighties. She describes the experience as one that made her welcome in the cruel woman\u2019s bed and also as the time she finally got her mother to hang up a picture of her in the house in Arlington. A wall reserved for grandchildren and barbecues, \u201ceveryone but me.\u201d Myles wrote on the back of the photo in pencil, \u201cPhoto taken by Robert Mapplethorpe NYC 8\/80,\u201d knowing that her mother had no idea who Robert Mapplethorpe was. \u201cThis was my favorite kind of art,\u201d she writes, \u201ca dirty secret.\u201d<\/p>\n

I felt that way, too, like my life had become a dirty secret. Drinking in bars with classmates until one A.M.<\/small>, riding the F train home, sitting in the kitchen until three in the morning writing. Riding my bike to warehouse parties on Dean Street. Flirting with men, timidly flirting with women. Singing in a band. Writing, writing, writing.<\/p>\n

At the reading, I was dumbly expecting to see the girl in the picture, twenty-something, hair brown and feathered, a self-imposed haircut, V-neck T-shirt, \u201clike a statue, all glowing stone.\u201d Myles was a lot older than I had imagined. She wore a tight cotton shirt and black framed glasses, and when the crowd had settled at the center of the store, she approached the mic and read like she wrote: Like Arlington, Massachusetts. Like a woman who thinks she looks like a boy. Like a godsend of a voice that cannot be replicated. Like, \u201cA war is storming and it is behind me and I am moving my forces into light.\u201d Maybe if I read enough Myles, I could write like that.<\/p>\n

\n

The greatest lesson in writing I ever had was given to me in an art class. The drawing instructor took a sheet of paper and held up a pencil. She very lightly put the pencil on the piece of paper and applied a little pressure; by bringing her hand a little ways in one direction, she left a mark upon the paper. \u201cThat\u2019s all there is to it,\u201d she said, \u201cbut it\u2019s a miracle. Once there was nothing, and now there\u2019s a mark.\u201d \u2014Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I was making my marks. I think we need to line poetry up with all the other arts. We are simply making marks, marks of sound, marks on paper. \u2014Eileen Myles, School of Fish<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Many of Myles\u2019s poems are written in long rows, three or four words on a line. The effect being quickly moving phrases, tumbling out. As if there is a river flowing through the center of the book.<\/p>\n

\n

Why is light
so damn emotional
if its just
a burning star
\u2014\u201cI\u2019m Moved\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I thought
Well I\u2019ll be a poet.
What could be more
foolish and obscure.
I became a lesbian.
Every woman in my
family looks like
a dyke but it\u2019s really
stepping off the flag
when you become one.
\u2014\u201cAn American Poem\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

All the hills & the trees
all the woman
chopping wood
outside &
the lazy
dog. I am
dedicated
to this. Its existence.
\u2014\u201cEn Garde\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

After the reading at St. Mark\u2019s, I approached her, this badass poet who sat at the information desk in the back of the store. All I could manage to say was, \u201cYour voice. Your incredible voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

She smiled. I told her about leaving San Diego to come to New York, which she had also recently done, except that she was coming back after having taught writing at UCSD. Now she was home. I handed her Chelsea Girls<\/em>\u2014\u201cWoah, I haven\u2019t seen this in a while,\u201d she said. On the title page she inscribed a message that looks like one of her poems:<\/p>\n

\n

Rachel \u2014
us escaping from
SD now in NY
yay \u2014
E<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I am reminded of something Myles said in \u201cThe Lesbian Poet,\u201d a talk she gave at St. Mark\u2019s Poetry Project in May 1994 as part of the Revolutionary Poetry Symposium. The speech was reprinted in her collection School of Fish<\/em> in 1997. I read it in my bathroom, where I keep most of my books of poetry:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThere is a word in Italian, affidamento<\/em>, which describes a relationship of trust between two women, in which the younger asks the elder to help her obtain something she desires. Women I know are turning around to see if that woman is here. The woman turning, that\u2019s the revolution. The room is gigantic, the woman is here.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

People like to focus on catty relationships between women. Competitive friendships between writers. Do the established of us care to help the emergent? We will never know if we don\u2019t turn around and look for them, these sisters, heroines, friends.<\/p>\n

Last May, I finished grad school, lost a job, and broke up with someone. I took a bus from New York to Maine. I found Maxfield Parrish<\/em>, a collection of Eileen\u2019s early and new poems from 1995 in Longfellow Books. I bought it, hiked up Blueberry Mountain with the collection in my bag, and at the top overlooked the Speckled Mountains spread around a small lake. I read the poems aloud, one after another.<\/p>\n

When I am afraid or worried or unsure about my life\u2014especially about this writing thing\u2014I try to remember \u201cJoan\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Today, May 30th, Joan
of Arc was burned.
She was 19 and
when she died
a man saw white doves
fly from her mouth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Newsflash: things don\u2019t work out perfectly. Since when did that stop us, women? Go, write now: \u201clike the smallest decision, like a boat slightly turning but now absolutely going in that direction.\u201d Look for help when you need it. Others have come before you. Others are turning around to help.<\/p>\n

Why do we read? It\u2019s a question I\u2019ve been asking my coworkers lately. We work at an independent bookstore in SoHo, handselling literature based on a customer\u2019s needs. People come into the store either knowing what they want or wanting to be told what to want. So it begs the question, Why? For instruction? For guidance? For fun? For a feeling? The best part about reading a good writer is that they make me want to write. If I can\u2019t read more than five pages without setting the book down, without turning to my own work, then I know there\u2019s something special going on. I would call that reading for inspiration. I would call that a feeling.<\/p>\n

I discovered Eileen Myles. At least that\u2019s what I told myself until I moved East and realized I was wrong. Isn\u2019t that what we all tell ourselves about our favorite writers? You are mine. The sixth time I saw Myles read, I told her I was stalking her. She did not smile; I think she thought I was serious. Maybe I was.<\/p>\n

Rachel Hurn\u2019s nonfiction and criticism have appeared on NewYorker.com and in the <\/em>Wall Street Journal and the<\/em> Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She is a bookseller at McNally Jackson and a graduate of the New School with an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction. She lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Bluestocking Books, my favorite indie bookstore in Hillcrest, San Diego, I pick up a glorious-looking object. The cover is textured, beige with a blue inside flap\u2014a look typical of the publisher Black Sparrow Press. On the front is a painting by Nicole Eisenman of twenty women in a brawl, or having sex, or both. 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