“I would like to be here, I think I’m here, and the more I write, and the more you read it the more it’s simply a fact.” As soon as I read that I understood that Eileen Myles is a literary descendent of Gertrude Stein. It’s not something that would ever have occurred to me before. How does that go with being the Boston-accented legatee of the O’Hara-Berrigan-Dlugos branch of the New York School? Maybe my surprise just means I don’t know Myles’s work as well as I should; their poetry, yes, but For Now is the first of their many works of prose that I have read. This idea of writing as something whose “point is to be here, to be present which I think is the truly hard part” is something I associate with Stein above all. This little book is a trio of lectures, and its being a script for performance allows for strange tricks with presence and time: there is the “here” and the “now” of the event of performance—the “delivery,” you might say, as in “The experience of standing here is extremely weird” (for reasons explained at length)—and the here and now of composition: I wonder what it was like to sit in an auditorium and hear “I’m listening to a train I’m crazy about in Marfa Texas the train is largely why I came here.” Was Myles listening to the train (in their imagination) when saying this? Or conjuring an illusion of listening? Or breaking the illusion of presence by invoking a different presence? I don’t know. But this writing is always looking for something that “signals the experience of presence even if it’s the presence at the front of my mind,” that is, other than the present presence in front of one’s eyes. It is fiction, especially when it’s supposed not to be. Toward the end of the book Myles describes “writing, at best, as always quickly darting off into what it does,” which is a beautiful way of saying that it goes where it’s not to do what it is. Somehow, in these lectures, all this about presence has something to do with being or not in New York, “the city [that] had created me as a writer,” New York where people met by chance in the street “say are you here”—questioning the nature of Myles’s presence. Which has something to do with what annoys all New Yorkers about each other (and probably annoys other people even more): we are all so caught up in our real estate travails. Myles too, and you learn more about them in this book than you might like. Well, doch dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde. (Why not invoke Hölderlin? “I’m Germanic,” Myles says in the midst of a shaggy dog story about a lost box of papers.) A thing I have not mentioned much in these entries but is true is that I trust my misreadings more than my readings. So: Myles, speaking about the kind of writer life they imagined for themselves as a young person, says, “There are writers who have jobs, they probably had a children and they had to get up at dawn to write for an hour and that’s not me.” Why? Well, “Queerness is a factor.” I get it, but to me it’s more interesting that at first I read it as “Queerness is a facture.” Facture: “the quality of the execution of a painting; an artist’s characteristic handling of the paint”—more generally, the crafting of anything, and by extension, the consistency of inclination discernable in the traces left by the activity of making in the thing made. With Myles as with Stein, it is interesting to think of queerness—a beautiful word I may never get to the bottom of—as not only a personal characteristic of the individual in relation to others, but also as a form of articulation of the writing they made out of that characteristic and relation. Myles’s poetry has been summed up as “casual, deceptively plainspoken, somewhat surrealistically discursive, intimately conversational,” but For Now exposes the intensity of consciousness that structures this art.
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Eileen Myles, For Now, is published by Yale University Press, New Haven, 2020.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.