Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of poet, author, and Guggenheim fellow, Eileen Myles's Arrival in New York City for Good. In their career, they've created more than 20 volumes of poetry and fiction, and their latest comes out next week titled A Working Life. Eileen makes some of the mundane, everyday experiences of being a New Yorker, dealing with alternate side parking, grabbing a slice of pizza on your way somewhere, attempting to rid your small apartment of mice. Well, it all feels profound and beautiful. The poems aren't just about New York, they're also about politics, dogs, aging, being in love. A working life will be published on April 18th, and Eileen will be speaking at The Bell House on Monday the 17th at 7:30. Right now, I'm thrilled that Eileen joins me in studio.

Nice to see you.

Eileen Myles: It's so great to be here.

Alison Stewart: Hey, listeners, Eileen is taking calls. What was your first experience with Eileen's work? Do you have a favorite Eileen Myles poem, or do you have a question about writing? Eileen Myles is available. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC, or you can reach out on social media at All Of It WNYC, that's both Twitter and Instagram. The title of the book, "A Working Life". What does that mean?

Eileen Myles: I think that it is not so much about labor, but more that moment when you're looking at your poems and trying to figure out what's real. Are they the real thing or am I the real thing? It's architectural. They're a design for the life.

Alison Stewart: The cover art is in, I'm assuming your handwriting. I know you do that on Instagram a lot. You communicate on Instagram by writing something on a piece of paper and posting it. Do you write your poems by hand?

Eileen Myles: I do, yes.

Alison Stewart: Why?

Eileen Myles: Well, I think if you write on a computer, the first draft of a poem is very important. When you're on a computer, you often start fixing stuff right away and then the first draft is gone. Paper is very reliable.

Alison Stewart: Well, with that in mind, would you read Pencil And Pen?

Eileen Myles: Oh my God, yes.

Alison Stewart: 192 was my segue.

Eileen Myles: Page numbers even, thank you.

Alison Stewart: Of course.

Eileen Myles: Pencil And Pen.

A minute is so

long

on my birthday

snow feasts

on the open

air and she

bought me flowers

in my color

which is

orange

my color is orange

you don’t know

your color is

orange. I do

but it is such

a gift

Myra had snow

I said

I want that

and now it

has come

71 is a birthday

of tiny

gifts

crafts and tinkers

just like

this.

Alison Stewart: That's Pencil And Pen from Eileen Myles. I'm going to describe the way it looks on the page. I think the longest line is four words, and that's the one A minute is so. They're two little words. They're in columns. When you're thinking about your writing, do you actually think about the form, the structure, these narrow columns?

Eileen Myles: It's very automatic, but I think it totally has to do with the speed of the thought and the speed that I want the person when they're reading it to take it and consume it in.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting. You want people to have a rapid experience through the words in some cases.

Eileen Myles: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: Is that your life as a New Yorker?

Eileen Myles: No. I think New York is all these fast messages hitting you, and poems become responses to all that. Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: What is the role of punctuation in your poetry?

Eileen Myles: Not much, because it seems to me in a way, it's like a voice recording. As we're talking right now, we're not going comma, semicolon, period, capital. We're not doing line breaks. We're not doing any of that. I think I try to have it be as true to the original communication, which was from head to paper.

Alison Stewart: Sometimes you deconstruct words like the word investment might become invest/meant. What do you like about breaking apart and deconstructing words?

Eileen Myles: You see all these little parts they have, I just could hear a Boston accent coming.

Alison Stewart: I was going to say explain that in a minute.

Eileen Myles: We'll do that. It's like syllables are the animal sounds of the language. You're like, it makes them out do all these different things. It's another way of putting the reader through the body of the poem.

Alison Stewart: All right. Let's explain the Boston accent.

Eileen Myles: I write in a Boston accent, even though I left Boston in 1974, but I got my sound system there, and I continue to use it sometimes more than others. I don't know why even. It's like a Wawa pedal.

Alison Stewart: Eileen Myles is my guest. The name of their new book of poetry is A Working Life. Where do you write?

Eileen Myles: Oh, all over the place. I write on planes, I write in bed. I love writing in bed. I write on the subway, I write on my phone. I write in workshops when I give people a poem to write, and then I'm just killing time and I write a poem too. Any and everywhere.

Alison Stewart: Tell me about the workshops.

Eileen Myles: Well, I don't teach, teach officially now. I had off and on for years, but now I'll go to The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, or somebody will say, "Would you do a Zoom workshop in Australia?" and then suddenly you're in a room with people, and an Adelaide. For me, I like workshops. They're really fun because I give what I got. I went to St. Mark's poetry project in the '70s. I studied with Ted Berrigan and Alice Knotley, and the tricks that they gave me then, I write with. In a way, there's a transmission from my own writing past that I'm sharing.

Alison Stewart: Sometimes you refer to Eileen in your poems. Is Eileen you?

Eileen Myles: Yes. Well, I think I always felt that way. There's a thing which is Eileen. There's an observable creature which is Eileen. It might be a little trauma, the tendency to look at yourself from the outside, but I do do it, and it's part of being inside, and being present is the hottest part, I think.

Alison Stewart: Because.

Eileen Myles: Well, I think everything in our culture tells us to think about how we look and what people want from us and where we're supposed to be and stuff. That's what I love about poetry, is it really is the tale of the interior. To tell the truth about that, you have to show how we're also stuck outside being Eileen, this character.

Alison Stewart: There are a lot of poems in this collection, and some of them appeared before in the New Yorker and the Paris Review. What is your writing practice? Like you said, you write everywhere. Do you set a time every day, or is it just the muse hits you, a word hits you, an idea hits you, then you go for it?

Eileen Myles: Well, I write different kinds of things. Poems, there's no time. Poems are any time and every time. It's breathing. It's just like being alive. It's the deal I made with life. Once I figured out I was a poet, I thought, oh, I'll be okay. Poems can come however they want. If I'm working on a novel, which I do, then I've got to set a schedule a bit and get myself in best possible shape, and then sit down at the desk and work for a few hours.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about some of the themes in the book and hear another poem. Beloved Park, I'm going to ask you to read. It's about one of your favorite spots in the city, one that you've been fighting to help save the Tree Canopy. People who listen to public radio probably know the story, but I'll spit out the basics. It was torn down to make way for the East Side Coastal Resilience Project that was supposed to thwart another disaster, like Superstorm Sandy. A lot of people are like, "Why do you have to destroy the park to that? Can we find a different way to do that?" It's actually dedicated to a politician who was a leader on that part of the project. Would you read Beloved Park and we can talk about it on the other side?

Eileen Myles: Thank you. I'm so happy that you picked this poem. Beloved Park for Colleen Rivera,

The City

is like

a mismanaged

notebook

found

on a bench

by a hopeful man

who spun

a tale

for the city

that wanted

to change

but once

the notebook

was his

he began

tearing out &

selling

its pages.

One page

the park

we

love

sold to a

man

who insisted

he could

make

the park

a boat.

But where

will the trees

go we

cried and the

birds that

are living

in them. The

park sailed

away in that

man’s

dream. It’s

the corruption

of government. It was

my bench

it was

our page

this

is our

sunny

day.

Alison Stewart: When you think about, why is poetry a good vehicle to take a stand?

Eileen Myles: Well, because it's immediate, because it's got all the information, because it holds what I hold. What I care about, it cares about. With my own passionate engagement with groups of people, a thousand people, a thousand trees, East River Park action, we all worked hard and still have a park. Ironically, a year ago today, I got arrested because they were cutting down the cherry trees. A hundred-year-old grove of cherry trees in bloom were being cut down to make a new park on top of the park. Neighbors were out there crying, and I just thought, okay, I'm ready. I was like, "When do I want to get arrested?" I ran out there and wrapped myself Jonah Park around the tree, and promptly was brought down to the precinct. It felt like civil disobedience sometimes is the only thing you could do except writing a poem.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Eileen Myles. The name of the new collection is A Working Life. If you would like to speak to Eileen, our phone line is open.

212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. If you have a question about writing or you have a favorite Eileen Myles poem, or you have seen Eileen perform, 212-433-9692. I'm saying that way too fast. 212-433-WNYC. There's so much nature imagery in your poems, and we live in New York City. For you, what is the role of nature in your life as a city dweller?

Eileen Myles: Oh, I think it's just the perfect echo. I feel like I've been lucky in my life that I've often lived near trees. We had a grip around Boston in a town called Arlington, and there was a tree out of the kitchen window, a chestnut tree, and we watched it change, we watched the blossoms come. Right now I live across from a cemetery. There's only two cemeteries in Manhattan, and I live across from one of them, so there's trees outside my window, so I'm very lucky.

I just simply feel like my-- Trees created oxygen, we couldn't be here if they weren't. They were here first, and they created oxygen, and then we were basically invited. I feel like there's such a sharing with the tree, and also they're like sculpture, they're vertical. They stand like we stand, and they stand with us in a way, so they're very political beings, I think.

Alison Stewart: The other wonderful creatures that you have in your Instagram a lot and in different work you do is dogs.

Eileen Myles: Dogs.

Alison Stewart: There's this great short film you did with David Fenster called The Trip. Is that your dog you co-star, Honey?

Eileen Myles: Oh yes, that's my dog.

Alison Stewart: Honey has lines that go on the screen. People have different relationships with dogs. For some people, they're companion, for some people they're like children. When you think about dogs, how do you think about them?

Eileen Myles: She's everything. She's a bit my partner, she's the person who absorbs all my realities, and she gives me landscape. Wherever I live, I'm forced to go outside and walk to Tompkins Square Park, or in Texas, we walk to the ranch land, and she tells me what's dangerous too. She was attacked by a Javelina in West Texas, the wild pig.

Alison Stewart: Oh my god.

Eileen Myles:: She knows what is at the perimeters, and so she's a testing friend too.

Alison Stewart: You spend a lot of time in Texas.

Eileen Myles: I do. Just enough to not lose my apartment here in New York, but yes, it's like-- I think as you grow up, you deserve to have a getaway place, and I always used all the rich friends or artists colonies. Then at some point, I thought, "Oh, I can buy a house," and I love Marfa, so it was the place.

Alison Stewart: A lot of really cool places have suffered an influx of people, the Instagramification of places. Has Marfa still retained its character?

Eileen Myles: Yes, because it's a bit of a festival town. There are times like Chinati Week, there's Rock Festivals, there's moments where everybody comes in and you can't even eat in a restaurant, you can't even get food and stuff. Most of the time, it's an empty little town with a population of 2,000 people, and we just all see each other in the post office. It reminds me a bit of where I grew up, and even that it's frozen in time so it has '50s to it, and so there's a way. I like to keep my childhood close.

Alison Stewart: Let's get you to read another poem that involves alternate side of the street parking pigs.

Eileen Myles: Great. Is it today or tomorrow, it's canceled. We live for those days so we don't have to move.

Alison Stewart: Right.

Eileen Myles: Pigs.

It is the first

day of the new

Year. The city honors

This day by not

Requiring us

To move our

Cars. I ran down

In flip flops

Then I looked

At the app

And discovered this

Fact. I said

Hi to my neighbor

and stumbled

Up the stairs. Are you okay

she said. Yes

I said but I felt

Not ashamed but mussed

Rattled. I started reading the

New Yorker

Which seems so

In between

I said so on Twitter

And one woman started flirting

With me. I had showed

My address in a photo

Of the magazine

& it sounded like

She would be right

Over. I said I had six

Kids & my husband

Was a brute. My friend

In Chicago laughed.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] That's so funny, that exchange. How do you decide to interact with social media and with people who are having this parasocial relationship with you a little bit?

Eileen Myles: I think you know when to punt, because people go too far sometimes, but it's often, it's such a cool banter, and it's so funny that you could have this immediate relationship with your friends all over the country and all over the world. I mean, my favorite part of that is that my friend in Chicago laughed. I was just like, "How did I know that?" Of course, it was like he made a laugh sign on Instagram.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned in your acknowledgments, "I'm grateful to the pandemic for causing me to write poems like it was the '70s." What does that mean exactly?

Eileen Myles: That means I'm part of that generation that I almost feel privileged shame. We were lucky enough to be poor and have cheap apartments, we could all live alone in our 20s. Everybody had this kind of privacy, and there were lots of crummy jobs, and you could have one, and you could drop it in a month and you still would not be in trouble economically. There was a lot of freedom which meant there was a lot of time, and you could stay up all night, and you had a lot of friends who stayed up all night.

We really could waste time, and I feel like waste is crucial to an artist, and really crucial to a poet because you're doing something that is not economically viable. In a way, your wealth is your ability to waste time and make this valueless art inside of it.

Alison Stewart: It's the economics that changed that, as well as I imagine the speed of things.

Eileen Myles: All of it. I have a real hard time with the speed too, that's exactly the point of what you pulled out, it's like the pandemic stopped everything. I think, obviously, people suffered. I got sick-

Alison Stewart: I'm sorry.

Eileen Myles: -but not too bad, but people died, but lots of us just had this different relationship to time itself, and was really beautiful.

Alison Stewart: As long as we're talking about time, I hope you don't mind me mentioning. You mentioned in your book, you're in your '70s. What has changed about your attitude towards aging, or how you feel about aging?

Eileen Myles: Oh, I have jokes about it. I feel like I'm the oldest living young person in a way. A lot of parts of my life, I think I lived them in a pretty young way, and I feel like, I don't know, I got it, why is that hard? I guess I have a conversation with aging, which is important. I have to have young friends and old friends, and I think I have to keep a balance. If I spend too much time with young people, I began to be in the same way that Eileen is other this older person is other so that I have to stay in a conversation too with people of my age so we can make jokes about things that people who were younger wouldn't get. Humor is really the salvation always.

Alison Stewart: I love you to read For Alex Katz, talking about someone who has embraced aging in the most graceful way.

Eileen Myles: Keeps working and making it, he's crazy.

Alison Stewart: 242.

Eileen Myles: For Alex Katz.

Because these paintings are both coming and going.

Finding nature and losing it.

I feel silent.

But that isn't how you feel.

Waiting world, violent friend.

Alison Stewart: That is For Alex Katz. It is from the new book of poetry A Working Life by Eileen Myles. You're going to be at The Bell House on April 17 at 7:30 PM. What's planned, if anything? Are you just going to read?

Eileen Myles: I get to be a band. I'm solo, so I'm going to read as long as I want, and people have to buy a book to come in, so I don't have to worry about reading short enough or long enough so that people will buy books. That's a done deal. It'll be just excessive and special however it is for you to be there.

Alison Stewart: Smart person. That's The Bell House on April 17 at 7:30 PM, A Working Life, the new poetry collection is out on April 18. Eileen, thank you for coming to the studio.

Eileen Myles: So glad to be here. Good to see you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: A new play, the tension between two Puerto Rican sisters boils over on a hot pot of Sancocho. The playwright, the director in the league will be with us right after the news.

[music]

 

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