Eileen Myles in Conversation with Ben Lerner

Eileen Myles has lived in her East Village apartment, where this interview took place, since 1977, and yet, entering her studio, I got the feeling she’d just moved in or was ready to move out—both make sense, because she is itinerant (since our conversations last summer, she’s been in Dublin and Lisbon and Oakland and Paris and Provincetown, Massachusetts, and several other places) and because she and her work are unsettled in the best sense: restless, disturbing, changeable. She has no imitable manner, no manners. She has an interesting art collection, but no clutter. Her only built-in furniture—a sort of combination bed-desk-bookshelf—was constructed by her painter friend Philip Shinnick while he was dog sitting in 1995 (Myles was in Russia). Otherwise, she has her brilliance and her stabilized rent.

The author of 19 books of poetry and prose, Myles is often referred to as an “institution”—the way one speaks of a terrific restaurant that’s endured the waves of gentrification as a “New York institution.” But the word bounces off her: there is nothing official about her, nothing staid or still. She is exemplary for more and more young writers precisely because she has gone her own way.

During our first talk, we ate scrambled eggs in front of an ineffectual fan. On subsequent visits, I brought iced coffee and stone fruit. There was no small talk and no dead air.

–Ben Lerner

Interviewer

You have a Boston accent . . .

Myles

In my writing more than my life. There’s just no true working-class vernacular in my life. My parents were the children of immigrants. My dad had two different kinds of Irish accent. My mother wanted us to speak good English because her first language was Polish. But the kids next door, who were lower class than us, spoke like Huck Finn. I wanted that. Part of it was my longing then to be real, like in books or in comic books. And when I briefly went to graduate school, people were talking about black English. I thought, Isn’t there some white equivalent? There is, but there isn’t. White people are too afraid to be trash. I was told the other day that I have the most hated accent. She meant I have the accent considered most racist to black listeners. That’s working class.

Interviewer

How has a conception of the vernacular—the speech, rhythm, and accent of the spoken—mattered to you as a writer?

Myles

The vernacular is the place where everything meets. It’s a gathering of people. Think of Sons and Lovers when Paul Morel goes to the pay window at the coal-mining office and talks in his local vernacular even though he’s an educated guy. I lived in Provincetown with a girlfriend, and we owned a house and workers would come over. And then I’d step into my Massachusetts accent to get the guys to not fuck us over. I think that’s avant-garde—the meeting of need and language. Take the Happenings in the 1960s, which were the beginning of postmodernism—what they were mainly interested in was the interface. How do we put film and bodies and poetry together? Now we’re in a world where everything’s sampled. Is there any place where the recording doesn’t meet the live event? What used to be new art is now life. We’re reeling around in this giant performance. When I wrote theater, I would think of each play as a Christmas tree, and the moments, the scenes in the play, were like ornaments. You can’t see it, but the tree’s there, and we’re putting on the ornaments, we’re putting the tinsel on, layers and layers, and moving with a confidence that there’s a place. And you compose fearlessly because there is a tree, there is a place. I feel like the vernacular is that.

Which reminds me, the poet I have been most excited about lately is Fred Moten. He is piling vernaculars on and singing. Even the academic vernacular. He is so smart. I liked all five of the books we had as finalists for the National Book Awards. Even Louise Glück’s book. I had never read a book of hers. Beautiful trembling lines, and I loved the prose. But she doesn’t know how to end a poem. That’s what really marks the difference between the mainstream and the avant-garde. It’s a different sense of the whole. If you’re in danger you have to know how to get out.

Interviewer

You’ve often referred—both in your writing and in interviews—to the career of the poet, to your career. I’m wondering how this fits into the discussion of class.

Myles

There’s a fundamental problem in working-class families. It’s like you revere art, you believe in reading, you believe in books, but you don’t understand their production. That’s the disconnect. Those are the keys you can’t have. And that’s the nonlineage that cuts people from other classes out of the art life. Art looks like a lottery from out there.

Interviewer

So what’s at stake for you in insisting on writing as a career?

Myles

I have made myself homeless. I have cut myself off from anything I knew prior to living in New York. I did this to myself, so I know exactly how it happened. Yet in the poetry world, people need to act like they don’t know how this happened. Like a je ne sais quoi, but it’s them. There’s a faux vernacular, as though the ambition must be hidden at all times, to be more, I don’t know, attractive? It’s the loafer posture, the veneer of I don’t really need this. People loved to talk about how Frank O’Hara didn’t really care about getting published. That doesn’t jibe with my experience.

Interviewer

Many poets—O’Hara, Ashbery—claim not to work very hard. Like O’Hara’s quip about knowing a poem is done when the phone rings.

Myles

It’s like we’re not doing business, we’re golfing. And there might be a little gender in there, too. When I was in Ireland I met a man who was Beckett’s favorite director. He talked about Beckett and how he wasn’t ambitious at all and how he had no idea how to get his manuscripts to publishers. But he had these ladies who he would have sex with who worshipped him, and they would type up his manuscripts and bring them around for him.

Interviewer

We could go back to Milton’s daughters, right? Taking dictation.

Myles

There’s a whole female industry engaged in materially supporting the illusion that the artist doesn’t work directly on his legacy, his immediate success. He’s just a beautiful stoner boy or an intellectual. All thought. No wife? I like turning that illusion inside out. And making the work be literally about the field and the failures and even the practice. I wrote about these things in Inferno because Dante did. We should let the writing world and its ways of distributing awards be part of fiction. We should expose the very cultural apparatus that is affecting the reception of the book you’re reading. What’s dirty is that we’re not supposed to talk about how it has sex and reproduces.

Interviewer

You’re both a maverick and very social. You’ve been involved in various “scenes”—St. Mark’s, parts of the art world, performance groups like Sister Spit—without being assimilated into any of them.

Myles

People render categories like modes of dismissal. If someone considers themself a Language poet or a conceptual poet, they generally will introduce me as a New York School poet. It’s a way of othering, but it’s also a way of building something, monumentalizing their own efforts. Voilà! This edifice. Where’s Marjorie Perloff to break the bottle on it? It’s the opposite of vernacular. In fact I have just discovered that vernacular comes from verna, meaning “slave,” a native—a born slave.

Interviewer

Are there any categories—whether pertaining to sexuality or class or style—that don’t rub you the wrong way?

Myles

I’ve been called a folk poet. I think that’s kind of cool.

Interviewer

I don’t know what that means.

Myles

I don’t either. Well, if there are folk singers, what does that mean? Does it mean folks hear you? Or does it mean that you’re covering old songs? I don’t mind being called a New York School writer, it just isn’t necessarily true.

Interviewer

Well, the New York School has always been a fiction, right? It’s not like Barbara Guest’s writing and John Ashbery’s writing are obviously part of a single school.

Myles

Same with Language poetry. Rae Armantrout and Charles Bernstein—not so much resemblance. Is Harryette Mullen a Language writer? But these poets agree to see themselves in conversation together. They form a cloud.

Interviewer

On the topic of insider-outsider, here I am interviewing you for The Paris Review, which has an experimental history but is also in many ways a mainstream publication. Are you at all afraid of being canonized?

Myles

I’m not, actually. Everything will ruin you, why not this. But if you do your work, somebody else will celebrate you, too. And we are having an interesting conversation. I’m talking my head off. This is a good experience. It could only bring good. When I took the job at UC somebody came up to me at a reading and said, How does it feel to have sold out? I’m like, What did I sign up for? A life of poverty?

Interviewer

Do you reject work because you feel like you’ve done it before? Do you kill a poem or piece of prose because you feel it’s too familiar?

Myles

I never kill a style. I like the idea of writing a poem I could have written 30 years ago. I’m the factory. My writing fears manifest more on the order of my inability to stop being Eileen Myles. I guess I don’t worry about my poems so much. I worry about me. It’s really creepy to be addicted to yourself or the performance of yourself. Like looking at your phone too much.

Interviewer

I think of how the topic of fame comes up in your early work. Sometimes it seems like a joke but sometimes it seems quite serious—I always knew I’d be famous, I’m fated to do this work. And of course you are famous, but it’s not as though you can’t go shopping without being recognized. Didn’t Ashbery say something about famous poets not being like famous human beings?

Myles

There’s nothing more ambitious than a young poet. You feel omnipotent. You’re on the upswing of bipolar. And that enrages older poets—which, to a certain sensibility, only makes you want to be more vapid and fame obsessed and glib. No one can tell you what the limits are. As it should be. No one’s got the keys to the kingdom.

A piece that’s missing in our talk about the avant-garde is gayness, campiness, queerness. Somebody like Arthur Russell was where avant-garde and discos and Buddhism met. Nightclubs. That was in the air when I was young. What do you do with someone like Ariana Reines right now? Claudia Rankine is famous. She’s political and she’s glamorous. I think it’s more interesting to think about how poets could have ever been so drab, why they would have made the choice to be poor, to be obscure, to not want fame. I guess it was a form of resistance, but lots of us were feeling the other thing. We weren’t leaving America, we were making another one. I hope we still are.

Interviewer

To what degree does a literary posterity ever enter your consciousness? I mean that old kind of poetic fame, that dream of immortality?

Myles

What do I care? I’ll be dead. I really care much more about the present, having this life that I want and being able to write the things I want to write and see them well published and not feeling obstructed, ambition-wise. I have a poem that contains the line “Fame is merely advanced sentiment.” It’s sort of like this extra feeling you’re putting forward. And what do you call that extra feeling? We don’t know where this is going to go. Like when you’re in a vehicle or on a train and you see fragments of vistas—a sign, a little town—and for some reason you remember that little town all your life. I feel like the repetition of fame is like that. It doesn’t have a place, but it has an amount of space that you want to know more about and you’d like it to be there. It’s not quite posterity—it’s like building a periscope, needing to see more, wanting to write already from that vista.

Featured photo by Irene Young.

Watch: Eileen Myles reads her poem “Merk.”