Arts Breakfast with Eileen Myles
posted by on November 9 at 15:40 PM
Travis Nichols’s great piece today about being on the road with the wiry punk queer poet Eileen Myles reminded me of a couple scrambled eggs I ate with the marvelous Myles one morning.
I’m pretty sure it was at a Denny’s in Auburn, and I’m guessing this was three years ago. I was interviewing Myles, who has a burned-out voice like Patti Smith, after she finished talking poetry with a class of high-school kids. I don’t remember much of what we said, but I remember that it was raining heavily and I felt surprisingly at ease. I have the distinct suspicion that she treated me as an actual person to eat breakfast with, not a journalist. That’s probably why I don’t remember much: it was a real conversation, not one for posterity. It’s a good memory. She’s a warm, funny, and upstanding (a strange kind of word to use on her, maybe, but I think it’s right) woman.
You can hear her talk here with another interviewer (the inspirational Paul Nelson) about the queer kids in Auburn, about how Allen Ginsburg tried to fix her up with his boyfriend, and about the spiritual moment that began her career, when she wrote a poem at her day job, looked down at the poem, and realized, “Oh, this is real. The job is not.”
Here’s her web site.
She looks like David Spade.
I love Eileen Myles! I remember hearing her read for the first time at New College in San Francisco in, I think, 1997 and having the feeling that my teachers had been hiding something about writing from me all those years. She just has that thing. I read with her years later in LA, and she was so charmingly shy. You sort of want to possess her, but can't of course. Definitely does the boring name of Poetry a great service!
eileen myles is a genius. coincidentally, her poem "november" is great
Stranger contributor.
Her comments in the audio link on being surprised that there were queer people in Auburn are incredibly condescending, even though she is admitting her mistake in being surpised, because it sounds like she is suggesting that the kids should realize that they can "go someplace different."
Maybe I misunderstood her full meaning or the broader context, given the short sound bite, but it sounded to me like classic urbanism. I'm from Auburn originally, and when I lived there twenty years ago, there were a ton of out queer kids. I don't know what it's like for kids now, but it was a fun place for me and my friends to grow up weird and different, we had each other. I hope it still is.
I know that lots of queer people choose to move to cities, but shouldn't an ultimate goal of gender and queer liberation be to to make it safe everywhere to be out, including the suburbs, especially for kids who are too young to move away?
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