One of the fears of poets and, I imagine, all writers, is that you’ll reach a certain age and you’ll run out of gas.
Evolution by Eileen Myles, Grove Press, New York, 222 pages, $23.
Eileen Myles is the rarest of birds: a celebrity poet. She is well-known, partly by her associations. She hung out with Ginsberg and Berrigan back in the ’60s, and in the recent past, she was girlfriends with Jill Soloway, the writer and producer of Transparent (a character on the show was modeled on Myles). A couple of her poems were quoted on the show. Myles wrote an essay about getting paid to write poetry in which she talks about having to ask for money for the poetry used on the program. She also talks about selling a poem in exchange for a room at an inn in North Carolina. Good deal.
Although Myles was born in Cambridge and went to Catholic school in Arlington, she is a New Yorker by temperament and she has that openness in her writing that you will experience if you happen to engage someone from that city in conversation. A recent piece in the New York Times by Irish transplant Maeve Higgins lamented that there’s no small talk in America. What she meant was in New York. New Yorkers will jump right in and tell you anything. Myles’ writing is like that. In some cases, this confessional quality is good because the writer appears both vulnerable and likeable. In other cases, the lack of boundaries can become self-indulgent and narcissistic.
me to be a Kennedy.
we are all Kennedys.
And I am your President.
So her response is witty and very informal but fresh and inventive. If you haven’t read the rest of the poem, it is available for free online at the Poetry Foundation site.
Myles is using the line breaks with one, or two word lines to create surprise. But, really, there just isn’t much going on here. I was looking forward to reading Evolution, but I could have made better use of my time by say, cleaning my room or taking a nap. You just never know what you’ll run into today when it comes to poetry. There is no reliable magazine or journal or website that you can go to and find high quality verse. I suppose it is like this in any given age. It is only after we’re dead — and our descendants have sifted through the rubble — that they will figure out our age’s Emily D and Walt W.
