NYC
What Happens When An OG New York School Poet Walks Into A Basement
by | Nov 21, 2023 10:54 am
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Posted to: Spoken Word
K Hank Jost Photos
Jackie Wang, Eileen Myles spit.
The Segue Foundation Reading Series featuring Eileen Myles
Artists Space
Tribeca, NYC
Nov. 18, 2023
Everything worth knowing about in NYC is tucked away in some nook or cranny. There’s no space for anything in all this new construction, venue demolition, and gentrification on the back of legacy’s corpse. Artists are kin with the rats, burrowing underground to hold their meetings bunkered up wherever they can. Enter Tribeca’s Artists Space. Walk down Canal Street, past the fake designer-brand open-air market and the dregs of Chinatown, a barber’s pole marks our entrance down Cortlandt Alley. Once inside, ignore the gallery itself displaying thoughtfully curated, contemporary, political abstractions. Head down the stairs to the basement beneath the hollow sidewalk above.
This is where poet James Sherry’s Segue Foundation has seen fit to host a reading series. Segue Foundation is one of the last remaining nonprofits seemingly dedicated to the true contemporary avant-garde in letters, going all the way back to the Language poets of the late ’70s.
On Saturday night they booked two readers: Semiotext(e) darling and former Harvard-punk Jackie Wang and Eileen Myles, an OG New York School poet, close friend of Allen Ginsberg, and ex-presidential candidate — a living legend, through and through.
It was refreshing to attend a reading that wasn’t not a seven-person cattle call of every half-distinguished writer the organizers know; two readers were given ample stage time to slow down, perform, and personalize.
But I’d be lying if I said it was anything other than Myles that brought my partner and me out that evening. They, Myles, are an absolute powerhouse and well-practiced in giving readings during horrifying eras of political history. They moved to NYC in 1974, with the well-documented intention of becoming a poet, and then the last quarter of the century followed — everything from the passive genocide of the gay community during the AIDS epidemic to the aggressive, swift shift of the American mind to the right. All to say, they approach the microphone with an air of earned wisdom, all the charm of poet coming out into the light, and stolid in their dedication to the craft.
Some words from my partner, who was moved to tears by the whole thing: “What a fucking privilege to witness someone who not only writes writing I’d like to be reading, but also looks like me and is out in the world asking for the same thing that I am — which is to exist outside of the this weird gender thing that we’re all doing, and to be respected as an artist. Maybe I’m ignorant, but I don’t think I realized until last night that there were role models for non-binary people to have. I’ve always thought our leaders were dead, or that they didn’t include non-binary people in their creative queer club..”
Without further introduction, since that ought to be enough, here was Eileen Myles:
They opened with a poem written 30 years ago, a breakup poem about the difficulties of being kicked out of one’s home.
“It seems to me,” Myles said, “that this whole war is about the question of home. Everything is about the question of home, maybe. … about who’s right it is to be where they are…”
The political tie-in was welcome, but the poem itself bloomed toward mundane truth. If the Beats of the generation prior to Myles wanted apartment complexes to the Tower of Babel, Myles’ own school would have them declaring simply they are apartment complexes. That’d be difficult and beautiful enough— “What a blast of white light we were,” they read. “Only that lousy apartment had any sex…”
Then they lost a page, a whole page in the middle of the poem, to which they reacted with something to the effect of, “Well, anyway, it just goes on to say fuck all this for like a whole page. I think you can put it together. Fuck all this.”
Eileen was unbothered by perfection, had little to prove to their audience, but nonetheless was there to prove it, to live it, to write it.
That’s not to say there was a shortage of absolute bangers in their reading. Feeder, a poem written after they were asked to review a collection of AI-generated poetry, features lines arguing why the proposition is so ridiculous: “My art is survival, and it is a violent act!” And “Don’t give the poets money, they’ll use it to pay their rent.”
The finale, a prose piece titled Tree, opened with a bombastic, “I feel raped by my intelligence.” Which perhaps is one of the primary difficulties of dedicating one’s life to the productions of art. History continues, the world falls apart, people are dying everywhere, and all your mind can bring you to do with your time here is scribble little lines, half-thoughts, and metaphored complaints? You, the poet, so keen in your diagnostic of the world’s ills, with such a clear vision of the skin after the salve, can do nothing useful toward the application of the panacea that would save us all? Myles, in their 70s now, does not shy away from these contradictive difficulties. At this point in their career, having earned with no small effort their place in the city’s canon, this knot between art and action was their subject.
Here’s to hoping for 70-some-odd more years of writing Maybe they can help the rest of us to figure it out. Art is the torch to bear into the darkness.
