Eileen Myles on Her Transparent Copy

After a feature on Transparent creator Jill Soloway in The New Yorker explained that the show's writers had decided to model a character on "the iconic lesbian poet Eileen Myles," Myles herself has written on the experience--both seeing herself studied, and being on set. At Wifey, she writes:

I kept trying to get myself in the right position. Where would I sit. I mean being me, watching what I was about to watch which was Cherry reading, being a version of myself. I was thinking they would of course be needing to shoot that. We rehearsed a bunch. This crowd of dyke extras of which I was one. We were there to hear Cherry Jones do her scene again and again. She was reading my poem. As hers. I had thought about this a lot. Just as Cherry Jones can play a poet Leslie Mackinaw based somewhat on an actual poet, Eileen Myles, so can a poem, this one called “School of Fish” be pawned off as a poem written someone else, the fictional poet Leslie Mackinaw. Like the poem like the actor can also have a job, go to work. The poem, made up, now just like something else made up like a teevee show can even earn a living. I felt parental. It was like the poem was my kid. I was pushing her out. No she was already at a party. She was invited. She was honored. The poem was working a lot more than I was sitting there in my tits in a cowboy hat in the afternoon. The poem was on stage in Cherry’s mouth (kind of weird) cause now she had my poem and my clothes and of course only part of the poem got read since it was too long, the scene mainly being this moment during a fictional women’s music festival when one woman, Ali, was falling in love with another, Leslie, which was actually the point of the scene and to my part of the world real evidence that poetry can do that. Without poetry, for sure, I wouldn’t be here at all. It was my love. It could have been a song but it was a poem instead.

Read it all here. And read "School of Fish." Above: Cherry Jones as Leslie Mackinaw in Transparent.