Eileen Myles’ Inferno.

Eileen Myles has been working on her Inferno for a long time. It has arrived and it is great. Here, Eileen Myles discusses her new book along with politickin’, the poetry lifestyle, getting wealthy, and avoiding libel suits.

MLR: Inferno is many things: It’s memoir, it’s a history of a particularly exciting/transitional time in New York City’s Lit/Art scene, it’s theory, it’s concrete advice for poets: “part of the trick I think of performance is that you need to be surprised too.” It’s a wonderful mess of experience, punctuated with epic, poetic generalizations and flippant self-reflections that make me want to cry, joyously. That’s one way I’d summarize it. We Who Are About To Die has a tradition of having authors do self-book-reviews. In the spirit of that, what do you see your book doing? Did you have the intention of doing any of those things I mentioned above? What makes your book so good?

EM: Well I wanted it to be alive. I wanted to make a record of where people like me had been, I wanted to tell someone how to write a poem and how to be a poet, I wanted to identify myself, but I also wanted to make fiction – out of poetry. I wanted to perform it. I wanted it to be a big long epic song about how a poet lives. I also wanted to freely strew lesbian reality in it so that the two meet in a public place and lurk together aesthetically. I wanted make a mess that shivered, and tie all the pieces up so it was whole. It was a lot of work. You know I just went to an artist’s lecture the other day and I was thinking about how they get to talk about their work. This is similar. Thanks. It’s fun. I’m glad you think it’s good. I do too. I think it’s a book that shouldn’t be so there’s some happy defiance in it. The possibility of making a fool of myself, of falling flat on my face was huge. That drove me though. It would have felt too lousy for it not to be good.

MLR: Inferno seems to validate the existence of poets. Like, it dedicates so much attention (a whole novel!) to these somewhat universal things that poets think about and talk about: networking, professorial sex-scandals, and poetry-voice. I know that the answer to this question is very present in your book, but can you reiterate? Can you remind us, yet again, why we poets should be allowed to exist?

EM: Well we do. We just do. We’ve opted for these remarkably un-capitalist lives in many ways though we are all doing it in the crevices or right out front of the library, university, bar where the reading takes place. We’re taking this tool which is language and pushing it to its first and last place and yet our labors seem to a lot of people and a lot of them are writers to constitute nothing at all. A child’s job. So I think even if I wasn’t one I would love them. On the other hand there are so many of us. It’s a natural impulse towards language to be a poet.

MLR: Did the idea of writing “a poet’s novel” come from that just being what your personal experience had been, or was there also some broader, explicitly political motivation? Was there some combination of the two?

EM:Well there was a part of Cool for You, my last novel that was about being a writer, a poet, and it sucked frankly and everyone who read it said so. So by eliminating it it wanted to live and have its own book. Also the book explains that literally when people have prodded me about the ridiculousness of using your own name in a book – like who is she after all, in terms of my own lack of importance, I decided I would simply answer that question. She is a poet. She is the poet Eileen Myles. So weirdly I think there’s something very third-persony in that impulse to do that to yourself or for yourself. To become a book.

MLR: Several years ago, I remember you saying, in one of Dodie Bellamy’s classes, that you had a tough time finding Cool For You a home ( I think you said it got rejected like 60 times) because no one was into publishing autobiographical narrative by people who weren’t famous. I feel like that’s changed a bit since and maybe partly because of, Cool For You. Like now, it is almost fashionable, in the small press world, or at least publishable, to write about being a not-famous writer. Do you agree that there’s been a shift? What was your experience like writing and publishing this book now that you’re more poetry-famous than you were back then? How did knowing that your novel would likely find a home change your process?

EM: Has there been a shift? Do you mean like Jonathan Ames, that kind of famous? Who else? Well I did know I could get it published. I mean I knew that about Cool For You too, but you know I’ve had the thought at various points that I should get money for one of these books and that really hasn’t changed. The closer the larger publishers have ever gotten to me the more they make it clear that if they took my book “we would have to work very closely.” And I knew what that meant so I’ve luckily found publishers both times who would do it, and do it beautifully and not muck up the book I meant it to be. That was true with Chelsea Girls too. I’m more poetry famous I guess, but I’m not wealthy. Cough- cough.

MLR:  That’s very interesting that the larger publishers would approach you in that way. It seems like they would know better, assuming they’ve read your work. When I say poetry-famous, I mean somehow acknowledged within this  small, poetry underworld, usually in the form of publication by a hip press, and being asked to read places.  Jonathan Ames could possibly be too famous to be poetry-famous. What will you do when you become wealthy?

EM: I would probably publish a magazine. Something that should exist that would still be in paper. Glossy with photographs and writing about all kinds of things. Also (this is the wish list still) I would have more control over when I write and when I travel. Maybe I don’t have to be so wealthy to have that.

MLR: I feel like the book addresses the fact that your writing deals with the personal as political, while also being overtly political. You address “otherness” in terms of race, gender, sexuality, very openly and candidly, and even talk about sort of getting props for it (at a reading in Germany). Can you talk about your motivation behind the both of these types of political writing?

EM: I mean I can’t not write about these things. They’ve shaped my experience. Being a lesbian in the poetry scene or even just female, being white and from a certain class and NOT wanting or even being able to assimilate really shapes your experience and brings you into a certain relationship to the world. I’m amazed constantly by the things I hear and see and only feel grateful that I have a medium in which to express them. The political is vital all the time. It’s the edge that begs to be exposed and hang out there in the sun. And stuff that feels necessary to say, to write about always has enough energy to be sung, to have a rhythm somehow. Difference sounds different.

MLR: I feel like it’s very unique, the way you write about your own identity,as a lesbian, working-class, poet, and sort of use this as a bridge into talking directly about race relations and other broader political issues. For example, you go from discussing your poetry, and working as the director of The Poetry Project, to:

“black Children are generally photographed in groups. That’s what I’m told . White photographers just have a hard time wrapping their minds around black kids as individuals. Unless one gets killed…”

There are obviously books where people discuss their lives and also discuss politics directly. But, I don’t think it’s something I’ve seen very much in the poetry world. I feel like it’s usually one or the other. Personal as political OR overtly political. Like within poetry, there are these opposing schools. The “identity writers” and “political writers” are ghettoized separately, and everyone else into their separate categories. I feel like the crossover happening in this book is important. Like it’s radical to go write about your experience being queer, and write about being a cool poet in NYC, while directly stating what you think about racism and feminism and lesbianism.

EM: Well I think those things aren’t separated in life. So I’m just installing these issues, identity, politics, poetry as they naturally occur. I think you have to work some to keep those things separate, actually. I bet, or I hope there’s more intermingling than we think.

MR: Could you talk a little bit about the intersection between your work and your life? How do you navigate writing about sex and friendship and arguments and other intimacies? Like, are you worried, as someone who writes autobiographically,about how people will react to being included in your work?

EM: Well I check with people frequently. I mean there’s such a thing as libel. You can actually get in trouble if anyone cares. Also I try and say no more than the world I live in can hold. Though I mean I definitely underestimate the impact of my words. I have some people I need to call. I sometimes think I’ve put things softer than I have. But people also surprise me. And I’ve managed to preserve some moments so that’s it’s like valuable photographs for people. You can’t use real people and not expect them to be responsive in a variety of ways. Like I thought about Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick, there’s a way in which all of this work is a performance. If you are in it you are affected to some degree. I didn’t write it alone, ultimately.