Evolution E-Book

Eileen Myles

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, 2019 New Statesman's best books of the year, 2018 This new book of poems and essays by Eileen Myles finds our game-changing writer keying lines in the euphoric style that the New York Times has called 'one of the essential voices in American poetry.' Following the critically claimed Afterglow (a dog memoir) and I Must Be Living Twice, their career-spanning selected poems, Evolution is Myles' first all-new poetry collection since 2011's Snowflake/different streets. These new poems upend genre in a vernacular that enacts, like nothing else, the way we speak (inside and out today). From walking around Marfa and New York City with an orange pit bull to Eileen's transcendent acceptance speech as President, Evolution lifts a can of Diet Coke as an End-of-the-World toast to embodiment, irreverence and risk.

Leseprobe

Also by Eileen Myles

Afterglow (a dog memoir)

I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975–2014

Snowflake / different streets

Inferno (a poet’s novel)

The Importance of Being Iceland / travel essays in art

Sorry, Tree

Tow (with drawings by artist Larry R. Collins)

Skies

on my way

Cool for You

School of Fish

Maxfield Parrish / early & new poems

The New Fuck You / adventures in lesbian reading (with Liz Kotz)

Chelsea Girls

Not Me

1969

Bread and Water

Sappho’s Boat

A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains

Polar Ode (with Anne Waldman)

The Irony of the Leash

evolution

eileen myles

First published in the United States of America in 2018 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Copyright © 2018 by Eileen Myles

Cover photograph © courtesy of the author

The moral right of Eileen Myles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Text Design by Norman E. Tuttle of Alpha Design & Composition

This book is set in 12 pt. Bembo by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

Hardback ISBN 978-1-61185-497-8

E-book ISBN 978-1-61185-932-4

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

groveatlantic.com

18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for Adam Fitzgerald

contents

Cover

Also by Eileen Myles

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

[I am Ann Lee …]

Evolution

Noggin

Harp

Car Notebook

Wet Paris

Walter Myles

Each Day I Get Up

We Are Stardust

G’s Body

BP

The City

15 minutes

our happiness

A Gift for You

The Baby

St. Joseph Father of Whales

Dream

Dream 2

for you

After the Season

Sept 18

Washington

To My Flowers

El Diablito

Angel

Sharing Fall

Paradise

Notell

beautiful cows

The City of New York

Paint Me a Penis

Large Large White Flowers

Dissolution

August 23

Photograph of everything

Sylvia

Acceptance Speech

Western Poem

The Earth

Jiggly

May 8

Epic for You

May 26

You

You

Circus

So

Today

Memorial Day

Today Egyptian

After Thought

Lark

A

Aloha

Television

Failed Appointment

Notebook, 1981

Kitchen/Holidays

In the Picture

End War

My Poems

While You Live Here

Poem at Dusk

Dear Adam

A Little Bit

The West

The Vow

creep

Transmission

A hundred per cent

Sweet heart

Acknowledgments

Back Cover

I am Ann Lee. I thought that would be a good place to start. I am Eileen Myles. I am 67 years old. My mother died on April 3rd. She was 96. I have not had sex since January. I am writing to you from Cape Cod. It was a horrible week. It was kind of a stray week. I really wanted to be home in New York and I had just gotten back from three weeks in Palestine, Ukraine and Russia. I resisted the impulse to say “the Ukraine.” Is that its name. I just wanted to be home after that. I had planned to be in Provincetown in August but there was this available week in June. I thought that’d be nice. Yeah but won’t you be tired. You know that thing where you know something but you speed up over that voice convincing yourself that the logical thing is true. I came up here with a friend and we did a little work together and next morning she got on one of those tiny planes. We thought this is such a Sagittarian trip that she would drive up to the Cape with me & my dog to do a little work and leave the next morning in order to hear a band named red ants spelled red aunts that she really loves and they were after all really great. I began my week of relaxing and working and being in my home state. I began to miss my mom. Around weather. Because it was horrible this week. It like rained all day long and all night long. I didn’t have to go to the beach but you know it was cold too and I was staying in an unheated shack in a part of Provincetown called Tasha Hill which is very rustic which means wet wood and hobbit houses and goats and horses and roaming dogs and chipmunks but like really chilly and the internet wasn’t working and the gas wasn’t on and using the space heater I blew a fuse. It’s a circuit corrected Thomas who I rented the place from. Who cares, it blew, it blew. It rained and rained and I wanted to call my mother in her nursing home in Greenfield and say what do you think of this weather. And she would say it stinks. But I can’t. That’s exactly the way I miss my mother. A deepening of the abyss with a hoot. I miss that. I mean there were many nice moments including one last night when it was already nice again and I was stepping over a wall onto the wooden ladder onto the beach and I thought I’m like Tennessee Williams. I’m like an old queer in the winter in Provincetown waiting for Marlon Brando to come down and fix the pipes and then prove to be the right one to play Stanley in Streetcar Named Desire. I did a little bit of research. Ann Lee thought that she was the church. Get it an edifice. And that is a radical thought. Not being cast as a thing. The live woman expanding out. Jesus was the church and she was the church. She was the second coming and now god was complete being both woman and man. It’s so important that she had those four miscarriages and never proved to lay an egg correctly and convinced her blacksmith husband to not lay eggs with her. People chuckle when you say Shakers when you remind them they were celibate. How did they reproduce. Well they adopted. They recruited. Foundlings! There were indentured Shakers I read which I am waiting for someone to explain the relationship between economic servitude and Shakerhood. The fact that you don’t have to breed to survive is inspiring to me. Or maybe it’s you won’t have to die. Right away. Ann Lee could have kept trying and one of those pregnancies might have made a baby and one of them would kill her. Not now. She said lifting a hand. I won’t survive but my church will. My work. That it was thought up or furthered by a woman who was not barren or infertile but generative. I am Eileen I am not celibate. I’m sort of between relationships and I’ve had sex a few times in the gap but I had a bit of that feeling of who is this for so I thought that’s no way to go ahead. I love that the place where the Shakers landed in this reproductive, no, productive, generative scheme—is the thought to make things and make things well. It’s such a beautiful thought. I won’t dwell on my own sexuality too much but I do want to say I love the idea of making something with another human being, perhaps me, not a baby but something nice. A special place perhaps. But for now I’m loving the solo place of the life well made. I thought well I was walking on the beach and I thought what about one blue stone and I picked it up. I’ve had all this crap in my pockets tokens of this and that and I’m ready to whittle it down and examine my own message and my own time. I’m holding this rock with that thought.

Did you watch Comey. People were like is he hot. I mean I don’t know. He’s beautiful unbeautiful like those boys I went to grade school with. The big bags under his eyes. To his credit HE did not make the joke about dinner with Trump being the all-time great excuse for breaking a date with your wife. That was the other guy. Yet he smirked because he was a man and a man has to get the other man’s joke or else it’s a cause for violence. But in that moment typically there was a woman pushed out thoughtlessly like a buffoon. Aren’t we all looking for an excuse to get away from her. But where are you going. To sit in this room. Do you remember when he talked about justice with a blindfold over her eyes. I realized at that moment that I had never wondered who put the blindfold on. It’s a construction. Whose? In his own defense Comey said she did not lift her blindfold and peek to see if her patron was pleased. I thought of that as a trans vernacular moment. Code shifting. I mean just before various speakers had been peppering their questions in this mostly male gathering, America’s Congress with their photographer and journalist friends, they peppered their talk with a number of “heck of a”s and gosh just to say that despite being suits they were manly men, trusty doers, and representatives of a doing nation, which we are not of course, so all these conceits to present ourselves as manly are drag of course, but my point is that when this tall man depicts his own relationship to justice the higher authority to whom he has dedicated his life he depicts her as she is historically depicted as the woman who has mysteriously had her sight taken away AND if HE were to degrade his lofty position he would do it coquettish-like, taking a peek like a girl. And that is only possible that rhetorical turn because justice has been presented as female—made wholly useful as a symbol, incomplete, because she is blinded by men. Male rhetoric would not work without the fall guy of woman. In the constructed absence of women we make lies. That’s what America makes.

Now the president I think the imputation was he was actually trying to feminize our guy and get him to lift that blinder and see if Donald was smiling at him or not. Comey was appealing to their masculine pride. Was he liking him now. Was Comey serving at his pleasure. There’s so much weird gender stuff in this largely government as men by men for men. If women are only a symbol then men may lie. When Trump asked Comey at the dinner table to do naughty things like take a loyalty oath to him and not to the blinded girl he gave vague answers back to him. The congressmen who questioned Comey asked well why why didn’t you tell him this was inappropriate. I I was stunned was Comey’s reply.

Let’s pause for a second. Doesn’t this sound like every rape case you’ve ever heard. And doesn’t the questioner normally barge in hard at that moment. You were STUNNED. I have a dictionary definition of the term stunned. Were you drugged. Did he hit you with his raygun. Everyone laughs. That did not happen. Because this is not a real girl. This is a feint. All the guys are in on the play. The audacity of the situation—a man presented by himself to all who already know him as such a one of high purpose and then been treated so cavalierly by this thug of a president—that is tantamount to an insult to all of us of course. Honest men. We’re going to see the stuff America is made of. We’re going to see how our democracy works! I was walking down Commercial Street with my dog holding my phone listening to this important testimony yesterday as Comey talked about his loyalty to the department of Justice and to the FBI for which he would be grateful all his life and tears came to my eyes. Notice this I thought. Why am I getting tearful. Who put this in me. Ann Lee proposed herself to be a church. Was I roofied. Is that why I cry. James Comey said that America was a shining city on a hill. Now that’s insane. What hill. He said that this was not a republican issue or democratic issue – he was talking about hacking now, about the Russians trying to hack our election. And nobody yet has mentioned that there was a female candidate who was robbed right in front of all of us of her rightful place of office as the president of the united states. I think because it wasn’t done to a man, it was done to a woman. Not having managed to land herself in the seat, she remains symbolic. He said I don’t THINK Russians ARE democrats or republicans and everyone laughed. The joke of course hid the lie in what he just said. The Russians were of course hacking on behalf of the Republican party or Donald Trump. When Trump asked Comey to go easy on Flynn, when he asked him to dispel this cloud around me, the Russian stuff, he admitted it was POSSIBLE that some of his SATELLITES might’ve talked to the Russians. Satellite is the word we need. Either Russia is a satellite of the Republican party or the Republican party is a satellite of Russia. That’s the dance. [Arm bar movement.] I love the Shaker thing about dancing. Will there be any of that this weekend. It seemed circular, it seemed like hands were raised at crucial times and sometimes people would go wig out for an ecstatic solo. Think about dancing. We have lost our rituals and we need them. I mean dancing was never so intense in my life as it was in junior high and high school really before I was having sex and you would feel this tremendous excitement in the watching and coordination and collective unh and bliss. The repression enabled I’ll speak for myself me to really cut loose. In New York in the 70s and 80s there was a free-floating loft party a dancing party called the loft and it would gather in lofts on special appointed nights there was probably a mailing list and mythic deejaying took off there, it changed the form, and numerous dance styles and merging of avant garde and disco and Buddhist chant (Arthur Russell) and people would just pulsate and sweat and it was very much a religion. I went once in the hey day like thirty years ago and then I went again it still happens the night before Thanksgiving you know we had just had this election and dancing seemed like the only cure and the party was in a small basement of a club in Brooklyn very interracial very all ages and there was an intuitive sharing of space. It was such a political thing. Late in the night a bunch of white rich kids descended on us the trumps I thought as they were extremely high and looked kind of grotesque they were dancing at you mocking the act of dancing even and pleasure and it felt violent as they took extra awkward even square space real estatey and you just felt pushed and I left. I went home. I had to get up early and go see my mother.

Did you ever watch the show The OA. I really recommend it. Netflix. The reason I mention it here is that it’s sort of about a cult that arises among a group of kidnapped people looking for a way out and their leader is this formerly blind woman who discovers her sight through dreams, and she begins to construct a way for her small community in adjoining glass cages by means of a choreography also discovered by her in dreams which will one by one liberate the dancers. The thing is you have to die. It’s the dreams you have while you’re dying. And there was some mechanism through which their captor would make each of them go through near death for his own purposes. Everyone was looking for something down there. Though the girl was originally from Russia and it was there that she lost her sight she travelled to America searching for her father and got kidnapped instead. But she became a leader inside as prisoners often do.

I have a bunch of poems I thought I might read you and also maybe two different well are they essays … one is a speech that I wrote for an event just before the election on the highline and it was organized around Zoe Leonard’s “I want a dyke for president” broadside which was posted I don’t know how many feet high outside, and her piece was inspired in fact by my own actually campaign as a dyke for president of the united states in 1992. Zoe said maybe you would like to update your campaign somehow. Yeah I thought. I would like to win. So I wrote that. And we honestly all thought Hillary was going to win at that moment and I DON’T presume that you all supported her. I did. I do presume like me you might believe that what we had in November was a coup. And that was what brought me here to the Feminine Mystic.1 It was the excellent invitation. Perhaps you agree with me that it was uncannily possible for us to have an open coup d’etat in America because the candidate was a woman. Not an American tried and true. Useful. A sewer of flags. Bake cookies, bake cookies. Perhaps someone who refuses to sit at the back of the bus and starts a revolution that way. Perhaps a claimer that I am a church, female head of a cult that invented clothespins and shared their inventions without patents like Native Americans sharing the sky and the land. What Comey said that enraged me the most is that he was outraged that the Russians would tamper with our electoral process. Our shining shitty on the hill. Anyone here could probably tell me how many countries have legally elected socialist presidents, and moderate presidents and communist presidents and much revered and inspiring presidents and our government in response utterly disregarding their electoral process funded a right-wing autocrat, a monarchist, a human-rights violator who would make a deal. I don’t know if we are the most corrupt nation on earth. Does it need to start there? It’s just that having taken the land from one people and then dragged another people from their continent to work on it for free and then deciding that you want California and Texas and Montana and Idaho and New Mexico and Arizona so you take that from another people I mean when I think that Los Angeles was a Mexican city in 1848. We just thought we would take it. And our soldiers went into Veracruz raping people. Just cause they could. And now we’re going to build a wall. James Comey is not the gentleman and Donald Trump is the barbarian. James Comey knows (everything I just said) and that’s the monstrosity. It’s just that James Comey can make me get teary-eyed like parades used to do cause I wanted to march and I never did. I guess I did once. I was in a group called ILGO—Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization. And they were chiefly about getting the Ancient Order of Hibernians to allow us to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. I didn’t know it could matter so much. I never realized how outside I was until I realized they wouldn’t let me in. They didn’t want me. I didn’t know. I just thought I was weird.

Once in the 80s I was on West 16th Street at a meeting at a church called St. Francis Xavier which was a cool church that would lay out the cots for the homeless after we left. But that night there was a candlelit procession going around sixth avenue down fifteenth street up fifth ave and up sixteenth again and the reason they were marching was that the cardinal of New York had just decided that Dignity the gay catholic group could no longer meet in catholic community spaces in all the boroughs of New York. Because of aids activism mainly. He was like oh yeah. Look what I can do.

I’m an ex catholic. Why would I care, but I stood there sobbing watching those women and men holding the orange candles as a symbol no a fact of their unvanquished pride. At the St Patrick’s day march I stood along the side of the parade pointing I think at the police shouting Shame Shame Shame. I guess because I have spent so much of my life feeling ambivalent about where I am, the institutions that bred me, the ways when I was younger I had to do insanely boring things to make money, the ways as a woman I was shocked at the things men said to me, that people of greater privilege said to me, that when I have an unambivalent feeling about wanting to take part in something, to blindly say yes, to yell something, to feel awe at a natural spectacle, to hear only the music I’m hearing the speech that I’m listening to dance when I’m dancing, to enjoy walking my dog, when I feel inside my life and any and any of its features I feel grateful and stunned. And I want to tell you about it. Because to be living in a country that has been actively constructing a lie for its entire history, and this most recent chapter is, I can’t help it, the most startling to me yet. If I was awake when Fred Hampton was shot in his bed by the FBI it might have mattered then. But in that whole hearing yesterday nobody went, but wait we’re not talking about in the abstract a future election that could be hacked. It happened. It already happened. And that requires us to be here. Now. No place else and it’s the hardest place in the world. Like I think Comey knows, they all know but if they don’t, if what we’re watching is a twelve step program of dishonesty then they are the stepford wives. And it’s always like that. Everything is the reverse. They are asleep and we are awake. They are weak and we are strong. Not because I am female but because I have the other in me. I am awake to feel that. Obviously I fail …

I shouldn’t have done this, I’m glad I did that. Do you do that. I want to get better. I want to feel awake all the time. I got asked to be the keynote here I thought of course. Feminine Mystic Shakers. It all adds up. In this climate, with this blue stone in my hand I must be here. I shouldn’t have gone to Russia. It was great but I didn’t really need to go. I absolutely am glad I went to Palestine. Let me witness some of that. Again I felt unlikely. I met someone in Texas who had just edited a book about writers on Palestine and we just liked each other. Ru Freeman is her name. So I’m in Boston for a month doing some residency. She asks me to come to New York and be on a panel in a bookstore about the book even though I’m not in it. I went. I couldn’t stop myself. I thought why am I doing this. Sitting on the train crazy and tired. And I thought most of the people in the room in New York couldn’t figure out why I was there. I was likening rent stabilized apartments in New York to Palestine. And you know it was true. I went back to Boston and like a year later I’m invited to Palestine. And it was amazing. It was just like my landlord. You know much worse. The goal in Palestine is ethnic cleansing. To get Palestinians out of the Jewish state. If you go to college outside of Palestine you can’t come home. If you go to college in Palestine you might get kidnapped. There’s a glass wall on the campus in Jerusalem the Israeli army keeps knocking down just for the fuck of it. They steal computers out of the labs. I mean these are like hot teenagers boys and girls with machine guns. We must understand kids. Youth. We must not send them to war. To die. To kill. I met a woman who was born in Canada. She lives in Ramallah now. She only knew her family was from Nazareth. Where’s that. She learned that her father’s younger brother was shot by a member of the IDF. With that he got out of there as quickly as he could with his family and never mentioned what had happened. Now that woman is a writer and a lawyer who specializes in demolitions. Obviously if you want people to leave you destroy their homes. Do you know any martyrs I asked her. I thought it must be local, it must be true. I had never been there before. Not in this life. Not on this planet. That’s why I’m telling you all this. She said she knew of this kid who was 17 or 18 and he was from a refugee family so the girl he wanted to marry’s family didn’t want her getting involved. Refugee=underclass. Worldwide right. Then I think he didn’t get into college. And then his friend was shot by the Israeli army. So. He strapped a bomb to himself and walked into a beauty parlor and blew it up. His family was devastated. Had no idea of this plan, the extent of his suffering. And their home of course was demolished. You can’t be there and see the settlements perched on the mountaintops and the hills terraced with Palestinian trees and flocks of sheep and roads built up the mountain that not only can the Palestinians not use, but their own roads are destroyed and what used to take ten minutes now takes an hour and there are checkpoints so it could be five hours or six hours. You could never get home.

If you saw this you would not be able to abide this suffering so you must not see it.

Comey says please don’t let me be alone with him again to Sessions about Trump and Pence can’t be alone with a woman other than his wife. Men fear predation widely.

I have the other in me so I don’t fear women or men.

I love this quote from Édouard Glissant, the Martinique poet & philosopher. No first this quote from someone else who “defined the utopia as something that’s missing.”2 We must be there. If it isn’t here we have to make it.

This is Glissant.

I think that utopia, in the end, for me, would be this force that is the opposite of power. This force that each of us has to be able to approach, intuit, touch, seize upon the inextricable of the world. And for that, there are no privileged classes. I say: we are all young before the world. And this youth, it’s the capacity to feel all the world’s flows mixing together, mixing together in a completely unexpected and completely inextricable way. Utopia is the force of feeling this.3

When I walked into my mother’s room on Thanksgiving she said you’re late. I’m not, I said. And I wasn’t. I’m always late but I arrived earlier. She must be confused. I had flowers. Here Mum. Oh why did you do that. She seemed genuinely troubled. You love flowers mom. Oh. Then I sat down. I was a little uncomfortable. I was so far from my mother. Across the room. We were going to have dinner downstairs. She heard they had a good spread. Next to me on the teevee table was Frosty. My aunt Anne, my mother’s sister, used to take a ceramics class. She had made this Frosty the snowman with a black top hat and see-through multicolored buttons down his belly that lit when you plugged it in. My sister who was the keeper of my mother’s things and things in general had just brought Frosty out for the holiday. I pulled my chair forward and I had to tug a little bit because it was attached to something and then I heard a crash. It was Frosty. Oh no. Look what you’ve done. Finally I had failed and I felt like my mother liked that. Each person from the nursing home coming in to clean up made it worse. Oh, Frosty they said. Oh no. That’s sad.

I began picking the pieces up. I put them in an empty coffee cup and took it home. Forget it my mother said. No I’m going to fix it. Frosty sat on my kitchen counter for a couple of weeks. I had gorilla glue and I was doing an awkward job and it looked bad. I was out with some friends at dinner and I told them the story and they laughed and laughed especially about the bad job I was doing. You should ask Andrew. Andrew? You know Andrew who makes ceramics. It was true. I hadn’t seen him in years. Do you have his number. He’s on facebook.

I explained the situation and Andrew instructed me to go to a sculptor’s shop in Manhattan to pick up some special clay. I brought it to his studio in Bushwick. He had an assistant there who seemed sweet and not entirely convinced he should be there. Angel. I think that was his name. Andrew paced and gleamed up at me. I think this should be no problem. In about a week. He looked up smiling at me. Great.

I saw my mother as herself one more time. She was very sleepy. Frosty stood guard in a new Eileen-proof position in the room. Hey Frosty looks good I said. I couldn’t resist. Yeah my mother said as if she were already doing much better things in the world.

When I saw her again she was asleep all the time. She had had a major stroke right after lunch. It was weird because she had been doing well and was even going to leave the nursing home and move in with my sister and her partner. People never leave the nursing home. Yeah but her heart changed that.

I was with her for five days. She was lying there with her mouth open snoring. I thought of high school when I would stay up watching late night teevee with her and my brother and she would fall asleep and we would laugh at her snoring. It was the exact same thing. We were awake and she was tired from her day.