Reviewing Eileen Myles's I Must Be Living Twice, erica kaufman Returns to the Substance

New at Boston Review is erica kaufman's "The End of Gender," a review of I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975–2014 by Eileen Myles. Kaufman draws our attention to Myles's new(ish) celebrity only to elevate the poetry: "This new fame makes it even more important that we return to the substance of her writing, so that her vital art continues to anchor her latter-day celebrity." More:

...Readers are accustomed to an “I” that tells a story, but Myles’s “I” is omnipotent, while not dependent on narrative or linearity. We trust the “I,” we travel with her, even when the path she takes is unexpected, disruptive, and surreal. Each jump engages the reader in the dynamism of the speaker’s unpredictable stanzas:

sometimes I can’t do anything but that’s okay bandaid book god that’s right

Visually these stanzas appear as clouds of various sizes sliding down the left margin of the page—site-specific and sound specific, working with and within a vernacular that pervades the poems and mirrors back onto the landscape they are written out of. Myles places the self in space, on the page, but always on her own terms. As she writes in “The Poet,” “The lines are designs for something / real, how much space around the slender bars I bend and shape in / the name of my world.” Indeed, Myles has crafted work a reader can walk around in.

But the space of this work is meant to challenge us, not to indulge us, with its unrelenting interrogation of selfhood and the lived experiences that shape one’s identity. Myles names some of these questions in an interview with Adam Fitzgerald: “How does one have a self? That’s like the great question. Not who am I? But what am I?” By pushing from who to what, Myles insists that we move past the pronoun that always points to specifications involving a person, ideally beyond answers rooted in normative binaries such as male and female. What asks for more information without mandating that this information be explicitly tied to a genre of body or being. Myles demands more careful attention to language, attention that grapples with the complexities of class and gender seldom articulated with direct rigor in contemporary poetry. Myles greets her reader with the kind of familiar language that reminds me of Gertrude Stein’s “continuous present”—language that everyone knows how to use and understand. Yet, as with Stein, we see familiar words become dismantled like “hey ducks / I don’t / look.” The speaker calls out, asks for attention, but doesn’t “look” as expected. This is writing that never acquiesces. If “to write / is a form / of accounting / & approximate / promise” (“Your Name”), then part of the act of writing is to find—or create—the lexicon that depicts how we understand our names.

Perhaps this rigor explains why reviews of Myles’s work, such as a recent piece in The Rumpus, focus on the way “sexuality is a core component of her identity” instead of on close readings of the work itself. When faced with walls of paintings in a gallery, the eye is always able to make surface judgments about color and image. It is much easier to label a text as concerned with “sexuality” than to examine rigorously the ways the poetry requires a reader to think about experiencing the world as both female and lesbian while rejecting easy definitions of either term. Sexuality presents low-hanging fruit because Myles writes beautifully and forcefully about it (“I am / the only saintly man in town. Don’t be afraid to be feminine. A girl / on a rowboat, full of holes. She saw words shooting through”). But left unconsidered is the way her work, which spans from 1975 to 2014, creates a necessary retrospective space that rejects heterosexual norms. Myles makes a new queer “norm” possible, visible.

Read on at Boston Review.