Eileen Myles Figures Process Through an Account of Home in New Yale Review

For the new issue of the Yale Review, Eileen Myles visits the voices and realities of East Village apartment-living. To begin at the end:

There are so many little buzzing sounds in my apartment. It’s a tiny place coming from both directions, sizzling in my ears. I have no doubt that I will go just not now.

I’ve had enough. All of this is good. All of this is a lie.

All of it’s an alibi. Because I am aware not so much that my own becoming a writer is a construction of sorts but more that there’s a kind of aesthetic experience I believe that precedes the work so that you kind of fail into it finding your style and content and opportunity all together at last. That’s happened enough times for me to believe that that’s my process and it exists and will occur again no matter how much suffering my work causes me and betrayal is so deeply a part of it because I’ll be sailing along thinking this is incredible and days later I’ll stop and some version of me that lives at a different pace reads what I’ve written and pronounces it bad and I return to it later and pick out pieces and surges and rearrange it so ultimately I’m talking about ease and how it is an utter fiction so I disbelieve all ideas about genre because it’s all such fabricated stuff, writing, art, music every bit of it is not so much lying but instead is perched in relation to this other thing which is living and however I am about it, doing this thing, in my case writing, makes that thing I think more beautiful. I have time for it. I am in it and I am relentlessly talking about time but I can feel it drumming, rarely am I really peaceful, no I’m happy but I’m digging this little hole right here which is really tearing a hole in the other thing, copying it somehow in a way I like.

Work frontwards here.