Excerpting Eileen Myles's Forward to F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry

Last week, The Paris Review published Eileen Myles's forward to F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, edited by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse. The book is forthcoming from isolarii, a subscription-based press that assembles "disparate writers, artists, filmmakers and architects to help us navigate the world anew." From the forward:

My friend CAConrad exists a great deal of the time in ALL CAPS.

I’ve only published one poem that way. It was written to be read at Occupy Wall Street where poets had the ideal situation which was to read their work and have each line repeated collectively like the human microphone. I feel this:

I’M PUTTING SOMETHING IN MY MOUTH
SOMETHING THAT’S YOURS, CHECHNYA
ONLY YOURS,
CHECHNYA

I was having a nervous breakdown in 1995 when I spent the summer in Russia. I was going through a breakup and she was with me, she was femme and I was butch and men gave her space and acted like I was invisible even though it was my gig. And I don’t drink and she did. People stopped speaking English once they got drunk and most of the English speakers anyhow were men. Who I met. And I was going through menopause. An episode in a female life

It’s only proper for a sham wedding,
The last lifeboat in the immense ocean

I’m not so much embedding these fragments of your work into mine as I made a pile of some of the things I found in this book and loved here and thought I’d paint the background in. Grass, intentions. Voices on the other side of the hedge. A lawnmower in the distance. Totally bourgeois. So what. I was moved that the first poem in the book was by Lida who then was named later on by Oksana in the middle of the book. I felt tossed into a community.… 

Read it all at The Paris Review.