Eileen Myles in Coversation at the Paris Review

Posted yesterday at the Paris Review is an insightful conversation, as one might expect, between Eileen Myles and Shoshana Olidort. The interview covers a good deal of space, ranging between Myles's new book, Evolution, the political moment we're in, Myles's writing career across genres, and thoughts on poetry and language. Olidort starts off with a prefatory note, beginning:

Eileen Myles may be the closest thing we have to a celebrity poet. In part, Myles’s stardom can be attributed to the award-winning television show Transparent, in which a queer poet played by Cherry Jones is based on Myles. But while Myles’s stint on television—in addition to serving as poet-muse, Myles made a cameo on the show—may help to explain their rise to a level of celebrity usually out of reach for even the most successful poets in America, Myles’s stature has been decades in the making.

From there, they dive into Myles's latest title, Evolution:

INTERVIEWER

Why don’t we start with the title of your new book, Evolution. What made you choose this title?

MYLES

The title is really simple. The first poem in the book is called “Evolution.” It’s a long poem that has a lot do with what the book is doing, which is a certain way of approaching the unknown. I love the word evolution because it holds a lot and is very uneven. Evolution doesn’t come in a constant way. It comes in spurts. It could be that a lot happens in ten minutes, and then nothing happens for ten thousand years. I was in New York, and I had more free time than I usually had—I didn’t yet have a new dog. There was a quaking and interesting emptiness in my life. The poem took that space and asked questions about sanity and craziness and communication and neighborhood, really big general questions about life and existence.

Later on, Olidort asks: "What do you think poetry offers us, particularly at this moment, given what’s going on in this country today?" Myles responds:

It always offers us the same thing: an opportune space to list things in an order that makes sense to you. Poetry is this kind of speech or statement that plays by its own deck. You can change the order, you can change the look of it on the page, you can use the right words, the wrong words, you can use English words, you can use words from other languages, you can appropriate languages. It is a utopian space in which to express. Poetry is structured like music, through gaps. But it’s language and I think that’s part of what’s upsetting to people who feel intimidated by it. They know what language does and now it’s doing something else.  It’s also kind of the opposite right now. Because the world is pretty scary, and because of the way we use twitter or instagram or texting, the ways that language is compressing and expanding and occupying space are very different than they were 20 years ago. Poetry has always resembled that, so it’s easy for poetry to be a comfortable space right now. But if you are simply concerned with already knowing, you may not want to know what poetry knows.

You know there's much more to dig into, so head to the Paris Review for all of it, including a discussion of this poem!