New Books by Dodie Bellamy & Eileen Myles Reviewed in Beautiful Essay at Bookforum

You know it's a good day when Dodie Bellamy and Eileen Myles are discussed in Bookforum! Lidija Haas looks at Bellamy's newest essay collection, When the Sick Rule the World (Semiotext(e)/MIT 2015), recalling that at the start of Barf Manifesto, she invokes Myles:

“Barf Manifesto” takes as its starting point another essay, “Everyday Barf,” by the poet Eileen Myles, a ten-page feat that also begins with a fuck-you to strict formal convention. Myles describes being asked to write a political sestina, then having the editor who commissioned the poem critique its technical flaws. She is not interested in acing her homework assignment: “It simply strikes me that form has a real honest engagement with content and therefore might even need to get a little sleazy with it suggesting it stop early or go too far.”

As well as reading Myles’s work for us, Bellamy presents us with a portrait of the poet herself, and of their often tricky friendship (we see Myles, the more famous writer, maniacally destroying a piñata; we see her humiliate Bellamy after she clogs her toilet—“keep pumping,” Myles barks). Here Bellamy offers, both explicitly and implicitly, a way of thinking about the charged, rivalrous relations between writers and their influences, writers and their subjects, writers and readers.

Haas goes on to review Eileen Myles's new books, too: I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems, and the reissue of of Chelsea Girls (both HarperCollins/Ecco). But always intertwined with Bellamy:

In “Barf Manifesto,” Bellamy notes that Myles in her barf essay “tracks how the personal intersects content intersects form intersects politics,” which her own work also aims to do. “Everyday Barf,” in Bellamy’s analysis, is structured like vomit: “Three gags followed by a tour de force rambling gush that twists and turns so violently, it’s hard to hold on to it.” Myles “spews recountings and opinions that frequently devolve into onomatopoeic grunts, such as ‘urp, wha wha wha, harrumph, blah, splat.’” The notion of writing as spewing is a complicated one: a fantasy of easeful productivity for any writer, but also a threatened accusation of unfiltered confessionalism for a woman using her own life and feelings as material. It evokes something uncontrolled and transgressive, and at the same time an almost impossible kind of rigor, a reaching toward a form that is not one, that is entirely transparent. The effect, whether achieved quickly or slowly, is still just that. Bellamy reports asking Myles how she accomplishes her self-concealing form, and being told that “she spends an hour planning the transitions, for if you have the transitions down, you can say anything.” (Myles’s “Writing” begins: “I can / connect // any two / things // that’s / god // teeny piece / of bandaid.”)

The transitions are precise because they have to be: It takes some doing to cram into one ten-page sweep the number of formal, political, and emotional insights and registers Myles manages (among other things, there’s the titular vomit-fest on a boat, guilt toward her mother, Bob Dylan’s memoir and the pointlessness of telling “the whole story,” class prejudice seeping through and compromising political protest, and the tradition of “accidental clown death” in her family: “My father died like that. Fell off the roof. Splat.”). Bellamy’s “Barf Manifesto” is likewise deftly stitched together; it’s in fact two separate essays, the second incorporating Myles’s reaction to the first...

Read all of "Tell It Slant" at Bookforum.