Class, Crisis, and the Commons in Eileen Myles’ Late Work

Abstract

Twenty-four years after running for President of the United States, on a platform of combating the AIDS epidemic and providing housing for all, Eileen Myles wrote an “Acceptance Speech.” It is partly – but only partly – a joke. Staged on a “beautiful rapturous sunny day in New York” (114), Myles poses as the President-Elect of the 2016 national election, a position later reserved in reality by Donald Trump, and implores their imagined electorate “to turn around, to look back and look at all that we’ve won” (114). Myles admits that they “may be getting ahead” of themselves, and that they may also be the only President to have eaten at the Bowery Mission and devoured “very rubbery, very chewy chicken” with the homeless, as well as the only President to identify as a “dyke” (114). They call for a New Deal-style program of radical redistribution of resources: multiplying the National Endowment of the Arts by tenfold, the refunding of the CETA Employment of Artists which federally employed more than 10,000 artists between 1974 and 1981, and the opening up of that “metonym,” The White House, to veterans of the “pointless wars” of Iraq and Afghanistan (114). It is difficult to see the invitation to “look back” on the victory of progressive politics in the United States, particularly from the vantage point of 2016, as anything other than ironic or profoundly misjudged. However, “Acceptance Speech” is a contradictory and lyrical text that defies easy categorization; it refuses to be, or to be only, a melancholic lament for progressive programs articulated through the cool detachment implicit in a tone of mock-triumph and humorous ambivalence. One summative reading might be: the national political battles have been lost, and instead, against those losses, we take up the call for “an art in America” (114). Myles, however, has consistently refused to acknowledge this as a retreat from forms of political commitment, and in an interview centered on “Acceptance Speech,” they defended “poetry [as] vastly political” and “as much a multiple as people and languages are . . . Even a poet who resists the idea that their work is political, that’s their politics” (qtd. in; Satran). Indeed, beyond the hyperbolic historical revisionism of its ostensible premise, “Acceptance Speech” performs a sincere ideological gesture: by self-consciously repurposing the epideictic rhetoric of shared