Threadworms, From the Archives: Eileen Myles
EILEEN MYLES
Clem Macleod talks to the iconic avante-garde poet and novelist about why movement is conducive to writing, their plans for a 1000 page novel and failed dreams of being a ballet dancer.
INTERVIEW BY CLEM MACLEOD
PHOTOS BY HONOR WEATHERALL
(AS SEEN IN worms 4)
I first came across Eileen Myles by way of my friend Chloe. For one of my birthdays, Chloewent into a shop and asked for "the most fucked up fiction books," and was handed Myles’ Chelsea Girls. What followed was a spiralling obsession with the writer, and a devouring of all of their books. It brings great pleasure to welcome Myles to the pages of Worms.
“just the fact of movement means that you’re doing something akin to writing.”
In an interview about your show at Bridget Donahue Gallery in 2018, you said, "You’re in the world of people, and you’re in the crowd. Everybody is getting out of work but you’re always in this walking space - which is your work." Can you tell me what you mean about "the walking space that is your work"?
The fact of walking anywhere, but specically in a city because there’s so much diversity and colliding information, just the fact of movement means that you’re doing something akin to writing. The easiest way to write a narrative is to go somewhere. The shortest narrative is we live and we die. I have a T-shirt that says "this body will be a corpse" which I love to give to people on their 60th birthday, they’re a little horrifed. The nature of working is gathering and letting go and choosing and editing and absorbing and recoiling from. Movement itself is productive of good writing. If you’re in a vehicle, on a plane, a boat, I always write on moving things. Me being the moving thing works the same way. I ride a bike in the city, that’s the main way I travel, and I don’t think of bike riding as conducive to writing at all. It’s very funny. There’s probably too much to think about when you’re riding a bike. Yeah, you’ve gotta be really awake. Even driving is more productive of writing. I guess I work through some good thoughts, but bike riding, nah.
The idea of psychogeography and the flâneur has always been quite male-dominated. Do you think that walking in the city has very different implications for women than it does for men?
Yeah. It’s obvious that to some degree, to be considered female or perceived as female means you’re less safe. Increasingly, I feel like we’re in post-patriarchal times, I like to think of it that way at least, because once we’ve identified it, I don’t think you can remove that awareness. People can refuse it, deny it, whatever, but we’re starting to understand the extent to which this culture was made to dominate women, and was made by men. It’s a warlike zone that we live in. The thing that most explained it to me was when I was reading a book called The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter. She was talking about women’s history within psychiatric institutions, and as we all know, psychiatric institutions were largely invented to control women. There was that funny word that you used to see all the time, neurasthenia. It was akin to hysteria, and the only way that men had the same symptoms was when they were shell shocked from war. I don’t think it says what wusses women are, it says what warlike conditions we live in daily. The act of walking is pronouncing your invulnerability and your vulnerability at once. One of the whole things about ageing or becoming more gender-fluid is that you don’t get bothered much. It’s kind of amazing. At first it’s a shock, and even a little lonely because you’re used to that constant mirroring, and then you think, "Oh my god!"
Why is no one harassing me on the streets?
Right? I’m an honorary man.
Do you think that the way we identify within a city determines the way that we navigate it?
In terms of where you go and where you don’t go? Yeah, absolutely. There’s such a sense of becoming a denizen. There are lots of projected fears on to the city and on to females, or even just young people, youth of colour in the city. A lot of one’s sense of experience produces a feeling of, "I’m not good enough." New York in the seventies was so different. People love to go, "Woah, you should’ve been here." I didn’t have much of a sense of danger, I got mugged on my block once, my apartment was robbed two or three times, but it wasn’t exceptional and it wasn’t anything I couldn’t live with. I know there were people whose stories were that they got to the city, they were robbed, they left.
In The Importance of Being Iceland, you say to Daniel Day Lewis, "I started writing poems in my twenties, and it got to be how I made a map of the world." Do you still think of your writing as a way of mapping out your environment and your place in the world?
I just don’t know any better, and I don’t want to. In the early days of the pandemic, I realised the fun of writing a poem on Zoom. I’d be in some meeting, and just looking at people in a different way with a different sense of timing. At least in the early moments, when I’d never been there before, I’d write poems from that position. I’m always interested in how much you can write as if the person reading it knows where you are without giving them an excess of symbols and signals. I just happened to be in Marfa when that famous week came in March where suddenly we weren’t travelling anymore. I’ve owned my house in Marfa for six years, but because of the way I travel, everybody took care of my dog and lived in my house more than I did. Certainly my dog lives in my house more than I do. The pandemic just delivered me to this location in such a sensational way and I got to watch nature change and it become April in Marfa. It was beautiful and I wrote a ton of poems. I was intending to be working on a novel, but I couldn’t help being where I was. I feel like I’ve said it a million times, but when I first started art writing, the editor of Art America said to me, "When in doubt, lean in the information." I was like, "What do you mean?" and she was like "describe." Everything I’ve ever read about writing that makes sense is that we’re just inventoring, we’re just making a fucking list. How could you not use what you were? It’s all over you.
The act of walking is pronouncing your invulnerability and your vulnerability at once.
Do you still write the same quantity as when you did when you started out in your twenties?
No. I write different. Yesterday I wrote a really short piece about a friend that’s a filmmaker. I keep that up in the afternoon. I have a little poem sitting here from a Zoom last night, but I don’t know if it will go anywhere. I write in my journal. I was just in Provincetown and I just got back to New York, so I’m still picking up the laundry, picking up the laundry again, getting some food, noticing that package didn’t get here, all that shit. I’m disrupted. But my life is not as simple as it was when I was in my twenties, and I notice that. I’m in the same apartment as I was then, but it was so sparse, and that’s what I loved. I never wanted to have one of those old people’s apartments where everywhere you turn there was piles of shit. That seemed like living hell. Now, I live in hell. Even though I have a house and a storage unit in New York, it’s just endlessly accruing. Being here for almost 50 years, there’s just that much stuff, that much paper. I had so much open space in my twenties because nobody knew who I was, I was making myself. Now part of the burden is being me and the things that I’m asked to do because of that. I was asked to judge four things most recently and I just had to wiggle out of that. To find the space is a different job
now.
Do you find it easier to write when you’re travelling?
Yeah. Provincetown was really great for that.
I’ve read in a number of different places that you write a lot on napkins and receipts and the back of aeroplane tickets.
It’s true. When I’m driving somewhere, I’ll write on whatever receipt is near me, and I don’t necessarily do very well.
Do you ever go back and revise things?
Yeah, always. It’s very rare that something is right. Usually it’s about removing stuff. Starting later, ending earlier. Throwing words out, I always tend to think there’s too many words.
When you’re driving do you ever write stuff on your phone, or does it always need to be handwritten?
The really good thing I did in the aughts, I lived in LA for a while, and I had a tiny little recorder. It was much better because it was dedicated, I went through a little surge of writing poems on that and it was good. I’ve recorded lots of stuff on my phone and I feel like I never remember to go back there and look. If it was really great I would remember it. The writing is a performance, honestly, just as this is, yet the performance of language between you and I at this moment seems like fun and fluid and I like how words come up, but to write a poem seems like a different language. The sexiness of the materials that you like are part of what stimulates writing. All this stuff about the clutter, I have a wave of self-consciousness as you’re seeing it! It’s a performative apartment.
Everything I’ve ever read about writing that makes sense is that we’re just inventoring, we’re just making a fucking list.
I find it really difficult to write notes on my laptop or my phone but it’s really foreign to people these days to use physical materials.
In the art world, there are painters and sculptors, filmmakers and people who cross over all the time. It makes sense that in writing, there are those of us who absolutely love the analogue. When I did art as a kid, I liked drawing more than painting. I liked ink. These are our materials.
It feels like there’s a scientific mind-body connection when you’re putting your pen to the paper though. Alice Flaherty writes about hypergraphia, which is when people are schizophrenic or very depressed and they can’t stop writing. It’s the only thing that makes them not insane, by just writing.
I went through a period in the mid nineties where I was in Russia losing my shit. I just couldn’t stop observing and writing down everything. I wrote probably two novels in that time, and so much stuff that I haven’t published.
If writers don’t write, maybe they just implode and have breakdowns.
It’s a weird knee to hold on. There’s a poet named Janine Pommy Vega, she was one of the female Beats. A really great woman, I don’t know if I liked her writing so much but I liked her a lot and she worked with prisoners and taught writing workshops. Once she was telling us about being quite young and doing exactly what we’re talking about, filling these notebooks and being in this mania, and I think it was completely unreadable. You couldn’t read it. She was writing so fast that all it was was the act of writing. Yet, it felt so good and it was what she needed to do.
Sometimes the best thing is to write something you know no one is going to read, you just need toget it out of you. I was going to ask about your writing environment and how important that space is for you? Or is it anywhere and everywhere?
It’s both. I’ve written a lot in this apartment. It had everything and nothing to do with where I was but other times, I just think I can’t write in here. I can write the piece I wrote yesterday about my friend the filmmaker, but I can’t... I can work on my novel here, but I don’t want to. For special projects, I really like going someplace to work on it. I think of my house in Marfa as that too, I feel very excited about what I’ve done in my life. I owned a house in San Diego for five years because I was a professor, and that’s what the University of California did for its professors at that time. But I didn’t want to live in San Diego. To not only have a house, but have a house where you want a house, and Marfa became that, it’s been really fun. Every few years, I need a new bathroom window and I think what if I get a round window? A round orange window? You know Kurt Schwitters, he had a thing called Merzbau and it was his house and his house was an artistic creation. You might not look at my house that way exactly.
Any artist’s house is an artistic creation because it’s an extension of the self, don’t you think?
Exactly, as is this apartment. I feel very good about going there to write and I’ve even created a little studio in the yard. I have now created another building outside that in some ways reminds me of this apartment.
I read about how you had recreated your New York apartment in Marfa, in the Windham Campbell For Now book that you wrote.
I didn’t even know I was doing it, and then it was like "fuck, why is there a bathtub in here?"
Do you ever go to public places to write?
Yeah, we know the library doesn’t exist right now, but I would, I have, I could.
When I think about writing, I think about the language body and all these movements.
Do you get recognised at the library?
Yeah, in a cafe or something I can and I do. Not to the extent that it’s a problem. Michelle Tea had the Radar Retreat a few years ago and the thing that was so funny was it was really great and the location was amazing, but it was unprivileged in a way because you didn’t have your own room, not to write in but period. What they had was writing hours, we would write from 9-12, then we would stop and have lunch, then we would write from 2-4. The person right here would be at their computer typing, and you’d be sitting on the porch writing. I thought, "How am I ever going to work in that?" But in fact, I wrote the puppet talk show, that bit of Afterglow there, on a porch next to somebody else. I had the idea, but it somehow flew. It’s really interesting to write around people. I’ve not made anything of it, but I have friends who go to cafes together to work and it’s probably a great practice.
If you weren’t writing, what do you think you’d be doing?
I don’t know. I don’t know where this sits in the universe, but I’ve always had this strange idea of being a dancer. It’s not even that I’m such a great dancer or that I dance so much. I like to dance, but increasingly I dance less in my life. When I was a child, briefly I did ballet, but it was enforced on me because I was such a tomboy. I really liked it but my friends who I did it with stopped doing it, so I just followed the crowd and stopped doing it. I’m someplace between athletic and I’m an artist. I’ve always been fascinated with old dancers' bodies. You see their bodies in a different way you see old people’s bodies. Sometimes they would be strong and buff. I sprained my ankle in May. I can walk, but I have to wrap it all the time. A sprained ankle particularly at my age can last a year. I don’t get to run. I’m wrapping it and it’s so funny because I just think, I look like an old dancer. There’s photos of Merce Cunningham who is always being wrapped because he was an old dancer and was always getting hurt, it’s been really in my consciousness lately, the old dancer.
There’s a special chalk that gymnasts use on their hands before they do their routines on the bars. I’ve always thought that the wrapped wrists combined with the chalk is really beautiful and amazing.
I know nothing about this chalk but I’m interested. I love any kinds of marking and writing that aren’t writing. I had a period where I was trying to learn to sail, and I became so excited by the existence of sailing language in the English language. I realised the whole thing was about sailing! On the beam, coming around, all this crazy language is rooted in the act of sailing. There’s something about it that feels exactly like writing, feeling the wind and compensating and turning. We have this incredible download of information and you’re tweaking all the time. When I think about writing, I think about the language body and all these movements. I know that when I read I do it, I do a little reading dance. You would see people do readings and I could see the laws, only cornballs and ridiculous people moved their bodies when they read. A serious or hip writer was just monotone, just there. All the sonorous poet ways. I was like, "Oh, if I can sound like Eileen, then I can be a poet and I can read and I’m not going to do anything other than sound like the poem is talking." That really worked for me. It took me a long while to realise that as a talking being, I move my hands all the time. Now it’s all folding into the old dancer motif.
You have a very specific way of reading your poetry and talking. When you read your books you can hear you speaking it, which you don’t get with a lot of writers. Reading Chelsea Girls in particular, that’s you, I have you in my head reading it out.
It came from that place. I think of writing as listening, so I feel like I’m receiving for sure. I didn’t think the voice was mine at first but I made it sound like me. As an organising principle, speech makes sense to me. Writing was intimidating in some ways, but writing to speak it.
Sometimes writing something down is much easier to communicate than saying something out loud.
Speech is the metaphor in my writing, but it’s become more complicated than that. It’s a long voiceover. There’s no question that’s what is going on. Then I understood that one is thinking too. When you look out the window, you don’t need to say "you look out the window," you just describe what’s out there. Using the voice as an editing device, but then using attention itself. I remember when I got a letter from my friend who went to camp, and my mother read my letter which is ridiculous. I remember my mother sneering and going "god! Ruthie writes like she sounds." It was true, the letter sounded just like Ruthie. It was my mother’s snootiness of what writing should be, like it should be something else. We labour with that all the time. I’m often regarded by some people as a Bukowski type. I think Bukowski wasn’t even that simple! I know that I’m regarded in some circles in a certain way because my work seems simple.
People who over-intellectualise things are seemingly usually much less sure of what they’re saying than people who are to the point and simple. I always feel like literature should be accessible to everyone, don’t you?
I agree. Even stylistic leaps should still be fathomable. The language of film and TV is so much more interesting than "literary language." To write in a very commonplace way but then move, that’s the thing that’s really exciting, the time travel of the work. How did you get from there to there? You can do it really well and really easily if you’re working with a very commonplace material. There’s this idea that comes out of fear or a class-based estrangement, that you have to become somebody else to write, or that somebody else is speaking, that there’s some objective reality. In that search to become that other, you become other from yourself. When I think of when Rimbaud said "I am an other," I think he meant quite the opposite of what people say. I think he meant I am that other which is myself. This burning crazy thing that seems so other to you is moi.
You write about Wolfgang Tillmans’ show at the Hammer and term the phrase "browser art," for what he does, which is render how he moves through the world. Would you consider your work browser art?
Oh yeah. A lot of my great discoveries in other people’s works are veiled references to my own work, because it’s always new names for describing an operation which I think is really exciting and primary. That was a discovery of that moment in time, what’s unique is how we move through the world. Everybody wants to know how everybody else does it. We just want to know, how does your flow go? In any new medium, people just want you to show them what that looks like.
What are you working on at the moment?
I wrote a pilot for a TV show which has something to do with American history and I was very excited about it a couple of years ago when I wrote it. For a number of reasons it didn’t go forward and I just showed it to someone who I really like and is really smart, and he was very encouraging, so I feel like I’m going to go back. I love the medium of all these series. I want to play in every realm that a writer can play in. I’m working on a novel called All My Loves and it’s a monster. I showed a little bit of it in 2013 and it began to drip. 2019, that summer and that fall, I worked in a much more dedicated way and it really started to get someplace and then the pandemic happened and I got derailed. I keep returning to it. I hope for it to be a big book, like 1,000 pages. That’s why I have to stop a lot of other stuff. No more blurbs, no more writing about friends’ work. It would be great to finish it in the next year or two.
