Eileen Myles is calling from a New York City cab. The Chelsea Girls author, a luminary and beloved poet who\u2019s now 76, is headed toward the East Village apartment they\u2019ve kept for nearly 50 years. That apartment is also the setting of Myles\u2019 latest work, Bird Watching. After sitting unpublished for close to five decades, the movie script\u2013length poem was published by the Portland small press and literary record label Fonograf Editions this spring. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like being in a conversation with an earlier version of myself,\u201d Myles says. <\/p>\n
In Bird Watching, a 28-year-old Myles writes over the summer of 1978, unfolding the days of their becoming. Scene by scene, Myles elaborates on personal manifestos, goings-on in \u201970s New York, and the activity in a tree full of birds outside their window. Plus, being in love with three people at the same time, dogs barking, thinking with your heart, and looking for a job.<\/p>\n
The book, which also anthologizes Myles\u2019 first three poetry collections\u2014The Irony of the Leash (1978), A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains (1981) and Sappho\u2019s Boat (1982)\u2014marks Myles\u2019 second collaboration with Fonograf. Their first, a vinyl LP of Myles reading their collection Aloha\/irish trees, was also the first thing Fonograf ever put out.<\/p>\n
On Aloha\/irish trees, we listen to Myles\u2019 broad Boston As, our attention captured by the spirit of their performance. \u201cRather than having this pristine studio recording of poetry readings,\u201d Myles says, \u201cI thought it would be more interesting to have me in the studio going \u2018fuck,\u2019 having stumbled over a word or something and then beginning again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Myles will be in Portland at the end of October to read for Fonograf\u2019s 10th Anniversary Fundraiser at Atrium Movement & Events. Expect two nights of live readings and music Oct. 23 and 24 (Myles reads on the 24th), with appearances by Rae Armantrout, Dao Strom, Mark Leidner, Golden Tiles, and more. Our conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.<\/p>\n
WW: How did you initially get connected with Fonograf for your LP Aloha\/irish trees? What was your understanding of Portland at the time? <\/p>\n
Eileen Myles: It was just very out of the blue because who knew what Fonograf was? It was just coming into existence then. Jeff Alessandrelli wrote to me and told me he was planning to start doing a label of records by poets, and I thought that sounded really cool. I\u2019ve been to Portland a bunch; it seems like one of the cities where people I know live, people live in ways that seem familiar to me. It was not a surprising place for a new idea to come out of.<\/p>\n
I was first introduced to your work through YouTube; I was immediately drawn in by how you performed. Have your feelings around performance changed over time? What has influenced the way you\u2019ve read your work?<\/p>\n
When I came to New York in the \u201970s, there were all these open mics. I didn\u2019t know any writers, and I didn\u2019t even know quite what a poet was, but I knew singers and songwriters. <\/p>\n
I was very drawn to the idea of performing with my voice at the microphone. I started doing that before I ever published. [Myles\u2019 first poetry reading was at CBGB\u2019s in 1974.] The only thing I thought early on was that I didn\u2019t want to sound like a poet. I wanted to sound like myself. Since I didn\u2019t know what poets were, I felt like the way I could have permission to be a poet was to not go so far away from what I was just doing as a person talking. I just wanted to be as ordinary as possible.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s stops and starts in things that I write. I hear silence sometimes in what I write\u2014and there\u2019s timing and there\u2019s rhythm and there\u2019s pace. I wasn\u2019t quite willing to acknowledge that when I read early on because I thought I\u2019d sound pretentious and precious. Over time I\u2019ve gotten more permission to stop and start and take my time and even walk away and say something in the middle of the poem and then go back to it\u2014just be much more plastic. What\u2019s on the page isn\u2019t something I\u2019m being obedient to, it\u2019s something I\u2019m being playful with.<\/p>\n
In the introduction of Bird Watching, you write, \u201cI remember how important it was to be not fake then.\u201d What did truth feel like for you then? Who were your models?<\/p>\n
All sorts of crazy things. There was a movie called King of Marvin Gardens that Jack Nicholson was in. He was like a contritional disc jockey. It\u2019s kind of a great movie, but it was like a \u201960s, \u201970s thing of people on late-night radio who would start pouring their guts out. It was a documentary thing but also an intimacy thing, a kind of purging. I loved that. All kinds of speech that weren\u2019t necessarily poetry were some of my models. <\/p>\n
Why not publish Bird Watching earlier?<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know. I have no answer to that. I knew that I loved that it existed, but I didn\u2019t know what it was. This is the right time. I think this is absolutely the right time. <\/p>\n
How do you feel rereading it?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s embarrassing, it\u2019s moving.<\/p>\n
At one point you write, \u201call sorts of shes & me \/ then me & her \/ then he \/ she, he \/ no she, then barely me.\u201d It almost starts sounding like the chirps and the peeps of the birds, abstracted and songful, obscuring gender in this way. At that time, were you thinking about expanding the self by playing with pronouns?<\/p>\n
I think I thought of it as comic. The collision of all these pronouns and the anonymity of it, so it was just kind of a chaos. I love the thought that it\u2019s kind of like the birds.<\/p>\n
What feels important in revisiting and republishing these early works?<\/p>\n
A lot of my readers\u2014it almost feels like most of my readers\u2014are young, like a lot younger than me. If I do a reading and a lot of people my age are there, and a lot of young people aren\u2019t, I\u2019m like, \u201cWhere\u2019s my people?\u201d It\u2019s certainly about Chelsea Girls, but it\u2019s something about my body of work that is in conversation with people who are the age I was the summer of things that I\u2019ve written about [in Bird Watching, 1978] were happening. What\u2019s really exciting for me is to have a piece of that that\u2019s authentically from that moment. It\u2019s like finding old clothes. You\u2019re like, \u201cOh my God, these jeans are from 1965.\u201d It feels very like a vintage poem. <\/p>\n
Any words for a young poet?<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t be afraid to be excessive, and don\u2019t be afraid to be quiet. Have your own rhythm and don\u2019t worry about what it looks like. It\u2019s about getting comfortable with the idea of being a poet, whatever that means, and making up what that means, because every poet reinvents it.<\/p>\n