I just had it on my list for days. It means write my last post. I did it. Anything I write from this word on is gravy. I’ve enjoyed the battles, Harriet, I’m grateful. I’ve even enjoyed my own forays down into the thread to do some serious barking. I’d especially like to thank the organizers of this blog. Merci. Friends. I’ve truly enjoyed the immediate opportunity to comment on the world of poetry, or the world, to speak as a female or a dyke or a person of a particular economic class or aesthetic class. I suppose there are people left in the world who think that to make too much of one or another of these things is tawdry. But my life, and many other lives are marked by these facts so it only seems reasonable for them to occasionally if not frequently appear in my writing. Especially here. Let’s face it, this is a remarkable form: the blog. A vague shape, supposedly not timeless at all. The very disposable nature of this medium is a challenge. What’s written here is saved like the internet is saved. Everything’s floating around somewhere but just the fact of that “somewhere” makes everything quickly feel pretty evanescent if not downright worthless. So it’s an opportunity to write right into the rim of your time. I think.
Thanks, Eileen. I agree with you about Robert Pinsky.
Eileen Myles, I want to thank you for your blogs and for, as you put it, your thinking on things poetic and worldly. Mostly I maintain a considerable distance from the poetry scene. But every so often, about every ten years or so, there comes the need to check in, see what is au currant. Thanks much for the window view. However you choose to define yourself, a woman, dyke, or of a particular class, you are certainly your own thinker. Admirable. One of my all time favorite writers is Colette. She too lived by her own rules.
Terreson
thank you eileen. after reading your post and terreson’s
comment, i thought eileen you’re a successor in a heros line that includes before you will inman the great gay poet hero who it was announced (ISSA’S UNTIDY HUT; POETRY BLOG FOR LILIPUT REVIEW that i was alerted to by Ron Silliman’s poetry blog) just died. carry on. all ways. edward mycue
Myles, you are too fucking cool! Your tenure here has been a riot and a pleasure.
You said:
“I’ve truly enjoyed the immediate opportunity to comment on the world of poetry, or the world, to speak as a female or a dyke or a person of a particular economic class or aesthetic class. I suppose there are people left in the world who think that to make too much of one or another of these things is tawdry.”
Thank you for this honesty. I truly hope you will check out my poetry and learn to rise above all of this human bullshit. We are, all of us, so much more than these ‘tawdry’ terms we allow to define us.
Gary
Thanks Gary. But I firmly believe the only way out is the way through. If we rise above we leave too much behind – like our body and even not so much our humanity but the thing that makes us like animals too. I forget what to call that thing but I would never seek to transcend it. It’s my friend.
That’s beautiful, Eileen.
yes.
margo
“… but the thing that makes us like animals too.”
In my strange world, to “rise above” means to BE more like the animals. Humans are too vicious for my taste.
Great embattled job you did here, Eileen. Thanks for talking off the cuff, from your soul, who you are as poet and everything else.
You regular posts will be missed. Thank you. I am glad you did it.
Thanks, Thanks, Thanks. I’ll be back w the erratic posts so see everyone here too….
I am also grateful, Eileen. Your posts, and perhaps more emphatically the reaction to them, has been a constant reminder of how difficult it is to be oneself in our society–our enlightened, educated society. How difficult it is to be different in any way–whether it’s how one structure’s one’s sentences, the point of view one takes, the vocabulary one chooses, who one sleeps with, or votes for, or relates to…whatever. We all say how open we are, but the reality seems quite different, quite difficult in fact.
Yes, that would be “structures” without an apostrophe. They crop up, those apostrophes and commas and my misuse of them, as if to remind me of how tenuous even that little bit of accuracy really is. And how easily those who breeze through language assume it should be for everyone else.
Eileen, I will miss your writing here. I just got a copy of
The Importance of Being Iceland and am loving it. . so it will sustain me for a little while. Take good care.
Yes, more gravy please, and not only on holidays?
Your post reminded me of Cavafy’s “Hidden Things.”
“Later, in a more perfect society,
someone else made just like me
is certain to appear and act freely.”
That’s the dream, isn’t it? I admire the way you move to make that dream a reality.