Eileen Myles Now

Abstract

In the conversation between Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson that we commissioned for this issue, the two writers begin by reflecting on the recent article about Myles published in The New York Times (May 18, 2022). The article focuses on Myles’ fight against the destruction of trees in East River Park on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, close to the apartment where Myles has lived since the 1970s. Myles complains of the article, “I’m so sick of the public account of who I am. It’s not like I think I’m a household name, but those same particular details have been trotted out so many times – it’s like sitting through a boring introduction of yourself at a reading.” It is perhaps inevitable that any biographical account of Myles will bore its subject, whose various existences include being a subcultural icon. Nelson responds to this problem, though, by reflecting on how the narrative of Myles’ life and work continually changes, if only by, for example, adding more decades to the amount of time Myles has lived in New York City. Nelson declares, “wow, what an honor for me to have heard you thinking about time, for the past thirty years,” which leads Myles to reflect on how the “constant movement” of time exists beyond any judgment of its quality: “I think probably the thing that was so disturbing about what happened in the park was the trees are that too. They’re this incredibly beautiful collective austere rendition of time that we live among and around. And a park is one of the many studios of the writer.” In American (and specifically New York City) poetry, trees and leaves become, both literally and metaphorically, books, poems, and people. Think, for example, of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), John Ashbery’s Some Trees (1956), and Myles’ own Sorry, Tree (2007). Myles has themself been around since 1949, and their work – currently twenty-two books, with a new anthology of Pathetic Literature announced on Instagram as we write – is itself being increasingly recognized as a beautiful collection of time. As is the case for Nelson and many others, for we who are editing this special issue of Women’s Studies on “Eileen Myles Now,” reading, writing and thinking about Myles’ work has become part of our living room, our studio. Our