In this review, Nadira Clare Wallace looks to Eileen Myles' recent collection a "Working Life" (Grove Press, 2023) in the longview of Myles' impressive poetry oeuvre. Taking in 'domestic clutter' and other details, we see how 'meaning fractalises' into a work that zings.
Over the decades Eileen Myles has managed to remain remarkably consistent, especially stylistically. Their trademark features include non-linearity: things often feel thrown together in an irregular way. For example, from the 1991 collection, Not Me: ‘… books on / a blanket, click, / dividing my time / by the tables, the / walks, 27, going / oh, oh, what / pain I need / whiskey sex / and I get / it.’. Frank O’Hara is of course an influence––his self-described ‘I do this I do that’ style of poetry. There is also Myles’s off-kilter grammar, at times verging on the anastrophic––‘a long rain / drop more / of a tear / fell from / an awning or a nail’, ‘Cigarette Girl’, Sorry, Tree (2007)––and vernacular diction, e.g.‘hopping under / the hokey / sidewalk / furniture shitty’, on my way (2001).
Combined, these traits typically create worlds which feel purposefully uncurated and Myles’ new book, a “Working Life” (2024), is full of them. Composed during the pandemic, the collection was released by Grove Press (which also publishes, for a UK readership, Claudia Rankine of Citizen: An American Lyric fame and Pulitzer Prize-winning Kay Ryan). According to Myles, a “Working Life” is ‘not about labour exactly’. The meaning of the title is that ‘the poems are the plan’. I think what Myles is suggesting here is that their book is a documentation of their life as a (seemingly pretty relentless) maker of poems. That aspect is not going to be hidden from view, and it isn’t. Flipping through the hardback I have, which is a stark, road-works-orange, I can find at least 8 references to poetry in the first 30 or so pages (the whole book is an impressive 268 pages). The ‘theme’ or reality (that all this is poetry about a poet) is not ubiquitous, but consistently present.
The opening poem, ‘For My Friend’, sets the shape and pace: It is skeletal, most lines reaching to no more than two words, creating a fast, tumbling reading experience. Myles’s stanzas are not standing places –– the original, Italian meaning of the word ‘stanza’ –– but more like staircases or ladders which the eye jerkily descends:
Nothing
better
for people
than dogs
nothing better than ma
king
you scream
here. []
Though, at times the haste-indicating lineation slows me down. Tripped up by something surprising or ambiguous like ‘ma / king’, I have to backtrack to make sure what I read was what I think I read. ‘Ma’ suggests –– phonetically and slangily –– ‘my’ as well as mother, while ‘king’ hints this screaming (maternal?) woman is seen as royalty by the speaker who is giving sexual pleasure. Now the word ‘making’ feels strange. It is a good de-familiarising trick.
In terms of content, ‘For My Friend’ touches on dogs, sex, new cars, pink chicken filets (which reminds me of O’Hara’s ‘avocado salad’ in the first line of his well-known ‘Poem'), a man in a plaid shirt, more food, a blue ladder, life after death and the ‘Now’ (‘Now / is large / rainy’). One effect of this somewhat random assortment of things and thoughts is the impression that the speaker is ‘going with the flow’, instead of hierarchising, e.g. some stuff is important enough to properly take stock of and put in a poem, some stuff is not. Years ago, I used to find this apparent lack of discrimination irritating. Details such as ‘pink chicken filets’ struck me as slyly pointless. Today, though, the demotic clutter –– alongside moments of great feeling and profundity –– conveys presentness for me. It is as if the writer/speaker is trying to be as faithful to their Now as possible. Perhaps even trying to keep up with the mind (hence the need for speed) –– or the the ‘chaos of thought’ as Myles termed a key interest in a recent YouTube conversation.
Often the subject-matter of the poems is existential –– in the simple sense that it foregrounds existence itself, aliveness itself. A particularly compelling example from ‘First Poem’:
every experience of being
& day
awakens
me to the dif
ficulty
I change
my socks
I see my feet
you don't
so much
mind my flaws
I think
at the
world
when I
go out.
This makes me think of the first moments of getting up in the morning, having to consciously experience being again. It can be dif ... ficult, like a word cut in half and hard to read. I also like how the expansive opening –– starting with an awareness that the speaker is –– narrows abruptly to socks. We are in a metaphysical realm before, bam, we’re looking at our feet (probably flawed, though it seems the people who love us don’t care). Maybe that is also part of the ‘difficulty’–– these lightning-fast switches between the immaterial and earthbound facts of the world (we ‘think / at’).
‘To Love’ is another existence-y lyric. The last stanza wraps up:
all of it
is true
and I in
my rot
am having
the
time
of my
life
Here line breaks encourage multiple readings. The first reading is that the speaker is expressing joie de vivre while aware that they are rotting. Quite a feat. But it could also be that the ‘I’ of the poem is reflecting on how they are having –– as in possessing, consuming even –– their time on earth. Is it true that, despite breaking down bodily, we can remain joyful? Or it is true that the speaker, trapped inside their deterioration, is having time like one has a meal –– eating time as they are eaten. Answer: ‘all of it’.
Ageing is often an overt theme. A poem entitled ‘Go’ is roguishly cheerful:
I’m going
good; tree top
pen I sprout
kiss
forgiveness
is everything
I grow old and hairy
pick me up
& carry
me I’m every
thing I sing
I’m 70
These lines really chime: ‘top’ slant-rhymes with ‘sprout’, ‘kiss’ with ‘forgiveness’, ‘hairy’ with ‘carry’, ‘thing’ internally with ‘sing’, while ‘70’ harks back to ‘every’. No rot this time. The ageing process is ‘going / good’ as the speaker, like a tree (wooden?) pen, sprouts––branches and/or, because of the end of the first stanza, hair (as usual with Myles, meaning fractalises, making the arboreal image apt). But does trying to pin down a visualisable image matter when the poem ends on a Whitmanesque ‘I’m every / thing I sing’? Not really.
In addition to reaching (sprouting, fertile) old age, ‘March 3’ celebrates being childless:
Weir-doo
woo woo
woo
what’s that
bird.
Because
I don’t
Have kids
And this
is such
a blessing.
This is a ‘weir-doo’ or weird section. Maybe the birdsong connects with the blessing of not having kids or maybe the mini-stanzas simply record the author’s mental movement –– from wondering about a bird to delighting in no progeny. The connective tenor-tissue could be freedom, which birds often symbolise in literature. But I have no supporting evidence for this.
Considering how lengthy a “Working Life” is, it is probably inevitable the collection contains some clunkier poems. I failed to get much from ‘The Library’, which is possibly from the perspective of two dogs (Penny and Paisley) and reads like a near-nonsense playground near-rhyme. A section: ‘and the sun warms the dog / and the dog warms the egg / and the egg warms the sea / and the sea warms the day’. Then there are the poems –– only a handful –– where everything strikes too diffusely, and the result is confusion.
Quibbles aside, the book is overwhelmingly forceful and fresh, containing many breathtaking lines of unsparing insight. I felt throughout a zesty determination, as I feel whenever I read anything by Myles, not to doctor what is going on for them. a “Working Life” is a trove for anyone drawn to honesty and depictions of the jumbled, rifely imperfect way we often register being here.
a “Working Life” can be ordered from many great bookstores, and here.
~
Text: Nadira Clare Wallace
Image: Nadira Clare Wallace
Published: 19/11/24
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