Eileen Myles Interviewed at Rookie Magazine

At Rookie magazine Tova Benjamin spends a moment with Eileen Myles ("prancing around in a suit") just before she went to the White House. Myles answers questions about genre, language, fiction, gender and more.

I want to start by asking you about the relationship between these two books and your other books. And when I ask this question, I’m thinking of how French or Spanish words enter the English language as “loan words,” but they retain their history while taking on new meaning. I’m wondering how a poem like “Peanut Butter” or “An American Poem” is different when it’s in a collection like Not Me [1999] and then how it might change when it enters I Must Be Living Twice?

It’s in a bigger river that I’m getting carried by at this time. The conclusions of the poems seem different. I don’t read that poem [“An American Poem”] much at all, or haven’t, up until recently, because it’s so much like my calling card. A lot of people know me through that poem. I’ve been on this tour and of course I wind up in Dallas, and I’m like, do I read it in Dallas? And also, what does Kennedy mean to a new generation? Kennedy meant something so specific to people in the ’80s and ’90s, people who came up in the ’60s and ’70s, and it’s like, does it even have the same punch? One of the things about having a new collection is that it gets mixed in with all the other days and months and years of poems and times, and you basically get to check what it’s flowing against in the world right now. Does it work? And I’m finding it does, but I think it works differently. Everything does. “Peanut Butter” was always one of my favorite poems but nobody made much of it. Suddenly it’s a coping poem, and I guess because of social media. People post it on social media and a lot of people who don’t know [my] work at all know that one poem. And then it becomes, do I read that? I know people really like this poem.

I think the whole cloud of this book is maybe figuring out how to be a poet differently. I’ve never been obscure. I’ve always been known in the poetry world and known in the queer world, but we all live in these different containers of community. Suddenly, I’m sort of thrown into this wider one. As a poet, you don’t think of yourself as having standards, like, “sing ‘Like a Rolling Stone’!” It’s funny to be that person. I get to play with my own oeuvre, so to speak, read it when I’m in the mood, be a little draggy. I’ve had much more of an experience of myself as a performer with this book. Because I do need to read the older work, and I love reading the older work, but it’s a different performance.

Continue reading at Rookie.