Dear Listener,

The first time I heard Eileen Myles perform live, I was at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, NJ sometime in 2018, working Poets House's booth with my friend Kinsey who was an intern at the time. There was almost no foot traffic in the atrium where our booth was positioned across from a half-dozen other booths, none of which seemed to require a physical body to sit at them and greet passersby. And, since there wasn’t any supervision–or more accurately, because for the first time in my life I was the supervisor, I made the decision that Kinsey and I would set the table and pick readings to attend for the rest of the day.

The first of those readings–set up in a middle school gymnasium, in front of the textured plastic backdrop of a set of blue bleachers that had been collapsed and flattened against the wall–was Eileen Myles. There were only a handful of others in attendance, and we sat in the front row. I remember wondering if we were in the right place and thinking I hadn’t actually been in a gym since middle school and would’ve preferred not to revisit the space as a queer adult who had once been a budding queer adolescent. The gymnasium seemed like a confusing place for a Big Name Poet to be reading. I’d been freshly hired by Poets House and already felt like an outsider because I hadn’t read much contemporary poetry, having not studied Creative Writing in college, but even I knew in a hazy way who Eileen Myles was.

When Eileen took the stage–I can’t remember now whether there actually was a stage, or if they stood before us at eye-level–they immediately made a comment about the space. Something about it being such a libidinally charged arena for reading queer poetry–and I thought, Exactly! Whether or not there was actually a stage, they created a stage in their presence. Their poems were blunt, exacting, generous in their humor and easy to listen to in a way I wasn’t used to experiencing at poetry readings. They talked about flossing, which I remember because they spoke with their hands and teeth. It might’ve been in a poem or the obligatory “banter” between poems that primes the audience for poems to come–but there wasn’t much difference between the two in their mode of reading, which was the most exciting thing. It seemed as though they’d walked into the gym with a few stories to tell and didn’t care whether these stories looked or read like poems or not.

I share this because listening to Eileen’s conversation with Rachel felt like listening to their stories in that gymnasium. It’s a hard thing to edit Eileen Myles, so to a great extent, we didn’t. The rhythms of their work, which slip so easily into the rhythms of their life in conversation, are all here. You’ll notice Rachel only asks Eileen to read once, and the reading flows so smoothly into the rhythm of conversation that it’s as easy to miss. That’s what Eileen, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet, is able to do—blur the line between speech and poetry, talk and writing. Much of the conversation revolves around what it means to be famous for being an outsider, which they are, but I think the reason for that is perhaps more interesting: that their presence on the outside repositions it as an inside and their work extends an invitation to the reader to be present there with them in conversation.

Eileen Myles (b. 1949, they/them) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has become a touchstone for the identity-fluid internet age. Pathetic Literature, which they edited came out in November. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994), Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). Books of poetry include Evolution (2018) and I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 and in April a “Working Life” a new collection of poems will be released upon the world. They take pictures which they’ve shown at Bridget Donahue & in Provincetown at Schoolhouse Gallery. Their super-8 road film “The Trip” is on YouTube. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.

LISTEN TO EPISODE 107 HERE!

For this episode, Commonplace Patreon Members will receive access to an mp3 of Myles reading from their epic novel-in-progress My Filmmaker, as well as a list of films that have influenced Myles’ writing.

Some members of the Commonplace Book Club will receive:

• PATHETIC LITERATURE edited by Eileen Myles

• INFERNO by Eileen Myles

• SNOWFLAKE by Eileen Myles

• SORRY, TREE by Eileen Myles

• Constance Debré's LOVE ME TENDER

• Bernadette Mayer's MILKWEED SMITHEREENS

‎Thanks to Grove Atlantic, OR Books, Wave Books, New Directions, and semiotext(e) for donating books!

For this episode, Commonplace’s charitable partner will donate $250 to No More Deaths/No Más Muertes.

From their website: “No More Deaths is a humanitarian organization based in southern Arizona. We began in 2004 in the form of a coalition of community and faith groups, dedicated to stepping up efforts to stop the deaths of migrants in the desert and to achieving the enactment of a set of Faith-Based Principles for Immigration Reform. We later developed into an autonomous project. Since 2008 we have been an official ministry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson.”

____________________________________________________________________________

[Our Favorite] Filmmaker[s]: If you’ve been reading along, you probably already know that we’re adding bonus content to these newsletters. It’s easy to be just another of the hundreds of emails you get in a day, but we hope that these personal touches from our team give all of you a little window into our actual lives behind the curtain. Eileen has shared with us some of their favorite films for our Patreon, so here are a few of ours!

• Langa’s Films

• Christine’s Films

• V’s Films (including one TV series)

If you want more film recommendations and other non-episode content from Commonplace, consider signing up for our Patreon! Patrons pledging $10 or higher will automatically become members of the Commonplace Book Club. This year, we’ll be experimenting with bringing listeners additional content—recipes, book recommendations, places to submit, etc.—through our newsletters. Later this year we’ll be moving to a tip-based subscription model for our new content-rich newsletter. Patrons will continue to get access to additional content related to each episode. All current newsletter subscribers will remain subscribed through March 2023, when they’ll be given the option to re-subscribe. We will, of course, continue to announce new episodes on social media and via shorter e-blasts.

____________________________________________________________________________

Up-and-Coming: In the coming months look out for additional conversations with Joy Harjo, Toi Derricotte, and more, as well as exclusive “Director’s Cuts” of Rachel’s Bagley Wright lectures (including one lecture you won’t find in The Poetics of Wrongness, her collected lectures coming soon from Wave Books), co-presented with the Bagley Wright Lecture Series!

Join the discussion on social media! What can you compare the experience of reading and writing poetry to? You can Tweet at us, DM us on Instagram, talk to us on Speakpipe, or even just reply to this email.

As always, thank you for listening and for your continued support.

Love and solidarity,

Valentine & the Commonplace Team