Especially
if you’re a poet, Eileen Myles’ Inferno:
A Poet’s Novel is an addicting read, almost like a drug, or at least it was
for me. I kept reading and reading
to see whose name would be mentioned next. Eileen has forged her path and made her own name on the New
York art scene from the mid-1970s up to the present day, so the roster of people
who appear in the pages of this literary tell-all is deep and vast. At a cursory glance and just for
starters (let’s try this out alphabetically rather than chronologically): John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Ted
Berrigan, Jim Carroll, Gregory Corso, Hart Crane, Tim Dlugos, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan,
Bill Knott, Michael Lally, Joan Larkin, Robert Lowell, Carson McCullers, Alice
Notley, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, Marge Piercy, Rene Ricard, Adrienne Rich,
Aram Saroyan, James Schuyler, Patti Smith, Anne Waldman.
Back
in November of 2001, I invited Eileen to give a talk in conjunction with a
course on queer identity that I teach at Emerson College in Boston. I recall that she brilliantly described
how exactly the New York art scene operates: it's a grid of intersecting friendships that overlays the gridded
map of the city’s intersecting streets and avenues. The above list of writers whom Myles encountered in her everyday life makes it clear just how precise her metaphor is. And most of the poets on this list are
ones whom Eileen met when they were in the early stages of their careers. As she wisely remarks, “There’s no
mystery why poetry is so elaborately practiced by the young. The material of the poems is energy
itself, not even language. Words
come later.”
Myles’ Inferno is “a poet’s novel” in
several senses: it’s written for
poets, largely about poets, and most importantly, it explores the life and
artistic evolution of the author herself, focusing mainly on her development
as a poet. It’s Eileen’s inferno
because (in addition to spending some time beside an erupting Hawaiian volcano) she’s our Virgil throughout the book, which is just like Eileen’s generosity — as
her readers, we get to be Dante, even though she’s the one who’s writing. Also just like Eileen: her poet's autobiography is a long and twisted
road through the descending circles of hell that ends in a subtitled section
called “Heaven.”
Commenting
on the narrative mode of the book late in the novel, Myles says, “It’s easy to
write an autobiography if the absence in the story is me. I remember applying to art school in
1967, staying up late, and I saw my reflection in the black glass of the
night. When a window becomes a
mirror. Who do I think I am
sitting here now, deeper in that life.”
There’s a wonderfully prescient echo of that passage very early in the
book, too, when Eileen remembers her late nights of studying at her desk as a
student at UMass Boston:
“Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was
someone. I wanted to wake my brain
up and be loved.”
In
fact, Eileen’s many commentaries on class and survival provide the book with
its most distinctive and valuable insights, highlighting the link between
starving artists and their unofficial patrons. Like few other writers can, Eileen manages to pack an entire
lifetime of experience into a single paragraph, along with some really sage
advice:
“Often,
the person in the loft and the little apartment or room know each other. This is the traditional definition of
cool. Because rich people need
poor friends (but not too poor!) to maintain their connection to the struggle
that spawned them even if they never struggled. Poor people tend to know what’s going on plus they are often
good-looking, at least when they are young and even later they are cool
interesting people the rich person once slept with, so the poor person always
feathers the nests of the rich. If
something bad happens to the poor person, the rich person would help. Everyone knows that. An artist’s responsibility for a very
long time is to get collected, socially.”
For
instance, Myles was fortunate to live for two years, on and off, at the
country estate of a wealthy New York couple, somewhere way out in the woods of
Pennsylvania. She describes her
time there, and the solitary, dedicated work of writing her poems, as a kind of
spiritual journey, one that liberated her from all of the trappings of society
and its litany of invasive constructs:
“I took my shirt off and I simply became no one, no name, no sex, just
moving alive across the land with a dog.
Art brought me this.” She even
begins to say a quiet little prayer each morning, appropriately, before she
starts to write. And who else but
Eileen could get totally, convincingly philosophical about watching her dog
Rosie take a shit?
I’ve
always loved how Eileen Myles’ thoughts and language swim on the page, darting
around here and there, impulsive and spontaneous, but also patient and
fluid. That kind of movement is gorgeously
examined in the title poem of her 1997 book School
of Fish. At one point in Inferno, she even devotes a whole
chapter to wondering what the fish inside an aquarium might be thinking and saying
to each other behind the glass.
The
poems in Snowflake actually seem to
be influenced a little more by light than by shape. In the poem titled “Day,” Eileen re-shades her surroundings
as a child’s watercolor:
“She
perceives
light
as
a paint by
number
leaping
into
a
dark two
a
puddle
to
the hump
of
her breathing”
These
poems are populated equally by clusters of separately shining cars in Los
Angeles and raccoons spotted on the tails of airplanes. Myles even conducts a cute conversation
with her cat in the poem “Eileen” (“Why can / you have a / giant plate / of pasta
/ and I can / no longer have / my crunchy / treats Why / am I served / up a cold / fish plate. / you’re not /
so thin / Eileen”). Snowflake is about both attention itself
and attention to change, particularly, as in the opening poem, “Transitions”:
“what’s
not technology
what’s
not seeing
an
arm to say
I
hold the
line I hold
the
day
I
watch the snowflake
melting”
“to
write
is
a form
of
accounting
&
approximate
promise
in
the sunny
mouth
of
time.”
