All class is a privilege, even the lowliest have a vernacular that is all their own that they use to keep people in and keep people out. I like to use a lot of vernaculars next to each other in awkward ways because we all deal with the filters of the larger culture which is always trying to decide if you know what you’re doing.

Trop interviews badass poet Eileen Myles about language, queerness, and interrogating the term “badass.”

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Here was former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Captain William B. Ecker, the U.S. Navy reconnaissance commander who flew the first low-level flight confirming the missiles, sitting down with Georgy Markovich Kornienko, the Soviet attaché at the USSR Embassy in Washington and Anatoly I. Gribkov, Head of the Operations Department of the USSR General Staff and a main planner of the missile installments — all alongside Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro himself with some 40 Cuban military personnel active during the crisis.

Now I might be getting a wee carried away with my metaphor, but there was something of that spirit of reconciliation in another, albeit less publicized meeting, held three years ago in 2009 (and so I guess I’m coming late to this) in the New York City offices of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. First, there was poet, translator, critic, editor and FSG president Jonathan Galassi. Joining him in his office was avant writer, poet, novelist, essayist, former St. Marks Poetry Project director and literary raconteur Eileen Myles. The conversation was moderated by Jesse Pearson of m.vice.com.

To say that Galassi and Myles represent two disparate points on the continuum of American poetry is to state the obvious, I know. This was a meeting between the poetics of the Flatiron District and the poetics of the East Village. A meeting between the Union Square Park’s elegance of, say, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill (and Galassi, too), and the Tomkins Square yawp-ery of say, Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg (and of course Myles).

But one of the delightful aspects of this thoroughly delightful conversation — I mean, I’ve been smiling with my whole body all the time I’ve been reading the transcript between these two sexagenarian former Bostonians — is that there is more common ground between them, more ease of unifying what, on the surface, appears to be different literary initiatives and ambitions, and more consensus, cohesion and collegiality all around.

In short, the scars are now just gossip. Savage, delicious, fabulous gossip at that!

These aren’t poetry’s ex-Cold Warriors so much as representatives of poetry’s contemporary fusion of identities. What they find unites them is something I was trying to address in a recent Poetry Wire (“If You Ain’t Got Your Poetics, Man, You’re Sunk”). It’s the idea that, to nearly all American poets, writing in whatever style, existence is fleeting, language is unifying, and poetry is an essential expression of human experience.

Rather than analyze the ideas Galassi and Myles take on, better, I think, to let you have some of the rich flavor of the communion that takes place between, and let them speak for themselves.

So, here is one extended exchange:

Jonathan: …when I came down in the mid-70s from Boston to New York, I felt I had missed out, actually, on the great moment of New York, which was the 60s artists and poets. And, of course, something else was happening here then, but my own training was much more rigid, I guess. So I always had a kind of hankering for the freedom of the New York School. But those two cultures didn’t talk to each other. There’s a famous debate, you know, the Lowell and Ginsberg —

Eileen: Were you at that reading?

Jonathan: No, but I’ve heard about it. And today, when you go back and read them side by side, what you’ll see more than anything is what they have in common.

Eileen: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Jonathan: But at the time, it felt like the mandarin versus the voyant, someone influenced by drugs and all who had this kind of dangerous freedom.

Eileen: Right, yeah. I remember hearing Denis Donoghue giving a talk one night in the 80s at the Poetry Project and saying, “Well, the last poet that anybody really broke friendships over was Lowell.” And in that room, it was such a crazy thing to say, like, “What? Where does this man come from?”

Jonathan: I love that, “broke friendships over.”

Eileen: Yeah, yeah, even the phrasing was just astonishing. And it’s so funny, too, because Allen, though he associated himself with a life of doing wild things, like posing naked and writing about his asshole, was in fact, in terms of drugs and all that, a moderate. He was always the person mopping up after everybody else.

Jonathan: But he was about freedom, and experimentation and, you know, breaking taboos and all that kind of stuff. It’s a quintessentially New York thing, somehow. It’s there from Walt Whitman on down. Don’t you think?

Eileen: What is?

Jonathan: The kind of freedom, the experimentation, the looseness, the humor, the spoken quality. I think of it as less worked. Do you think that’s right?

Eileen: Less worked? You mean the—

Jonathan: In other words, if you look at a Lowell poem, you know that it’s been sewn into its form.

Eileen: I guess I think of Schuyler, again, because his philosophy was so great about it all. I remember him saying that the writing-the-poem part is the easy part; it’s the rest of your life that’s the problem.

Jonathan: Right.

Eileen: And I think that with Jimmy and a lot of poets, though they certainly do edit, there still was a perception that the practice was the life itself, and the economy was expressed in the line rather than in the edit. I mean you really could break down poetries into the poetry school that believes in perfection, and pushing the poem toward that, and the poetry school that believes in practice and is about profuseness.

Jonathan: Right, right.

Eileen: With somebody like Jimmy, it’s like you want to find the really great ones in a slew of poems.

Jonathan: Right. I think that’s a good way of describing it. It’s not just a different formal approach, it’s a different approach to writing per se. Actually, I think of Bishop as someone who stands in between the two because she was a very, very hard worker on her poems, but she loved O’Hara and Schuyler. And I think that the naturalness of her voice—though it has a very different formal vestment—is much closer to the spirit of Schuyler than to Lowell, actually.

Eileen: Yeah, and her poems land in ways that feel like the poem happened. Like that sonnet that ends, “and you love me.”

Jonathan: “And you love me.”

Eileen: It was just like Jimmy ending his poem “This Dark Apartment” with “They were/not my lovers, though./You were. You said so.”

Jonathan: Right.

And here is another cool exchange:

Jonathan: So, what do you think is happening in poetry today?

Eileen: That’s what I was going to ask you! [laughter] I guess I’m thinking about a young person today who’s into poetry and almost no matter what their persuasion is, there’s kind of a sense that there’s a lot of hurdles for them to jump over toward becoming a poet. It seemed so open when I got to town, and it seemed that you would learn a lot just by being here and by going to readings or meeting everybody and looking at all the other kinds of art. When I think of our generation, I think, in many ways the gesture, or the one that’s gotten the most play, is Language poetry. But I feel that there’s an eruption going on right now, too, and we’re not hearing about it yet because of all the historical talk, the need to make schools of poetry, and because of the tendency of people in their 50s and 60s to be telling their history…

Jonathan: Rewriting history?

Eileen: Yeah. I was trying to be kind, but yeah. Like a bunch of them have started to write a group autobiography about this particular reading series in the 70s and how it produced them. [laughs] I mean, I love many of these poets and their work, but there’s something troubling about poetry revisionism. Because I think lots of other things were happening too in the late 20th century. Messier things. I think that since they’re clearly staking a claim, putting a big sign on poetry history, I think there’s a need to pull out and explore some of the other things that happened in the 70s and 80s and 90s besides them.

Jonathan: Right. I’m doing a book with Charles Bernstein, a selected poems, because I thought it would be fun to have FSG publish something from the Language-poetry school. But you know, when you read his book, it’s not very different from a lot of other folks. It’s a bit like what I was saying about Lowell and Ginsberg. When you actually step away from the polemics, the differences aren’t as large. I think that Language poetry has been—and I don’t read it that much—but my impression of it is that it’s going more toward other things now. It’s less meaning-averse; it’s much more meaningful.

Eileen: Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan: Is that right?

Eileen: Yeah, I think that even ten years into it, it was like film—experimental film. Suddenly it was like, “Why not use an ‘I,’ but ‘I’ doesn’t mean ‘I’ necessarily,” or, “Why not do a narrative, but a disrupted narrative?”

Jonathan: I always felt like Dada, for instance, which is like an ancestor of Language poetry—

Eileen: Or New York School, I think.

Jonathan: Yeah, except, Dada is where the meaning is disrupted, and it’s not supposed to have a meaning that’s rational, that’s prosaic.

Eileen: Mm-hmm.

Jonathan: But once you’ve done that once, you’ve done it. You’ve made your point, and then you have to do something else, I think. And I feel that way about Language poetry, too. But maybe I’m missing something. It’s just not my thing. What is my thing, though, that I associate with New York School, is its open speech. Relaxed, natural, but very artful. I think Schuyler is the best at it. And when he was at his best, he was as good as any other poet who’s writing now, I think. It’s very close to the best of even Lowell and Bishop. Like Lowell in Day by Day, his last book, which is free verse, really, not rhymed and not sonnet form. And it’s very melancholy and depressed.

Eileen: Going back to Schuyler, I think it’s interesting that he keeps getting rediscovered.

Jonathan: His flow is—sometimes the flow is verbiage, but when he hits it, it’s just the natural stream of consciousness.

Eileen: Yeah, it’s limpid.

Jonathan: Limpid, and it couldn’t be better. It’s perfect.

As with those Cuban missile crisis veterans, surely the arc of history for American poets is from war to detente to reconciliation to unification. Let’s hope so.

Our critics could be better at highlighting the connecting facets between poets of different schools instead of cheering on one school over the other. Surely our reviewers could be better at locating the connecting, underground roots of American poetry, and acknowledging that, like canes of bamboo, the connections lead to the spread. Or, that the various schools of poetry are like a shared ecosystem and not islands separated by shark-infested waters.

In a lot of essential ways, the differences in American poetry sometimes come down to the difference between x+y versus y+x.

It’s a matter of emphasis, no? It’s a matter of unifying what both Galassi and Myles come to share in this lovely conference, that the poem aspires to equal the life, and the life aspires to equal the poem. That some poets seek to perfect the life of the poem, while others seek to perfect the life of the poet. That whatever route one takes, one ought to be focused on the shared ideals, the shared ambitions, the shared difficulty, and pain, and transcendence, and pleasure.

And to acknowledge, at long last, that the poetry wars are over, that the orthodox and the avant are one and the same.

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The New Inquiry conducts a five question interview with Eileen Myles. (Did you catch “15 Minutes,” a new poem by Myles, and part of our 2012 National Poetry Month project?)

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Eileen Myles has published more than twenty books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays, and libretti. However, she is probably first and foremost known as a poet. With Snowflake / different streets, she returns to the form for the first time since the 2007 publication of Sorry, Tree. Published as a flipbook, Snowflake / different streets is actually two separate collections, each with its own set of themes and concerns, but each marked with the characteristic short lines and quotidian subjects that readers have come to expect from Myles.

Snowflake opens with a poem titled “Transitions,” and that seems to largely get at what this collection is about–a time of change, uncertainty, unease, and restlessness. The poems find the speaker alone with her thoughts, often traveling from one place to another, whether by car or plane, so even the landscape is in a state of change. Even with the movement, there is a sense of suspension, as she concludes “Transitions”:

I hold the
line I hold
the day
I watch the snowflake
melting

The speaker seems to be stuck between the past and whatever is to come next. In the title poem, the speaker has more agency, moving her ex-lover’s items into storage and changing the locks. However, it’s not just a revenge narrative; the speaker reflects on her loneliness and isolation, finding the inability to relate to anyone: “There’s no female / in my position // There’s no man.” She finds herself to be the only witness to events around her:

wow
there’s a raccoon
on the tail
of the plane
and there’s
no one

seeing that now
but me

and there’s no one close
enough

Myles is much more introverted here than in her previous book of poems. In this collection, she’s not simply lamenting a lost relationship, though that’s certainly part of it. There’s a sense that the author is getting older and has seen how the environment has changed (“you could put your hand in the water / & hit a fish or two // now you gotta / go look”) and how technology has changed, perhaps creating more distance between one another. She laments the phone as no longer being the same string connecting people, but now “we carry / them and / have no homes.” However, Snowflake isn’t all doom and gloom. It also includes funny observations, such as in the poem “Observance,” about traffic in Los Angeles, and it includes a great love poem titled “Girlfriend.” In “To My Class,” Myles writes that she’s trying to sort some things out at this time in her life and that “the body / place is / a thinking / place.” Snowflake offers a glimpse into the thinking.

In different streets, the companion to Snowflake, Myles offers the meta-commentary: “The new poems / are poems of / healing. / But first I’ll / be funny.” And overall they are lighter than the poems in Snowflake, but there remains an attention to aging, though it isn’t portrayed as a bad thing because it brings the wisdom that “[a]nyone / can be beautiful / at 19 or 30.” In “pencil poem #5,” Myles writes, “it’s a strange gig / this body I’m riding / for 59 years,” which gets at the multitudes of experience–both good and bad–that one has, and also hints that no matter what age someone is, things will continue to surprise him or her.

The isolation that existed in the other collection is gone here. In “Mitten,” Myles writes:

Last
night in “Different
Streets” which I didn’t
bother to write I made
the point that the two places
are connected and it’s great
where you are too
and boom boom rumble
all the places are connected
thus the endless
beauty.

The poet/speaker is reconnected to the world around her and takes pleasure in the simple facts of the day, much like the speakers in Sorry, Tree. In “idiot ho,” she asks sans question mark whether it is mad “to say I / like May / so so so / much / at this exact moment // stupid, wet.” The reader senses that even if it is madness causing the behavior, it wouldn’t make any difference to the delight the speaker feels.

The speaker finds herself “stinking of love,” moving through the collection with energy and a willingness to face the day with full force. However, much as Snowflake wasn’t all dark, different streets isn’t all highs. In “smile,” the speaker says, “I would go out into the world with this / enormous hurt. And I have carried mine / for so long I now know it’s nothing special.” In other poems, she describes herself as a monster who will cry until the end of her life. However, the voice doesn’t come across as self-pitying; rather, it’s wise, the voice of someone who contains multitudes.

Several poems stand out in different streets, including “the nervous entertainment,” “the weather,” “mitten,” and “the perfect faceless fish,” but every poem has something to offer. Myles can pack a lot into few words, such as in “2008: for emma,” a seven line poem that concludes: “The bed not so much / made / as simply / closed.” Another poem, “became” describes Myles’s desire to stuff a day full of details:

today
is so subtle
I can jam tiny details
in its jaw
& it holds them
it’s a strong day
that can withstand change

From these two new books, the reader can gather that it isn’t just the day that is strong and can withstand change, but the same words can be applied to the speakers of these poems and to Myles herself.

Read “15 Minutes,” a new poem from Eileen Myles and our day 13 entry of The Rumpus’s 2012 National Poetry Month Project.

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15 minutes

the beaming sun
sun
out there
resembles
a light bulb
the sun
is that bright
Ashville is on a mountain
of Crystal
that inspired me
I had to get out of there
fast
depending on who
uses it
anything
you make can
be broken
reset
I can hear the faint
pattern
in the water
falling on tin
or stainless
steel. Its ugly
little message
doesn’t annoy me
so much as make
me wonder
if it’s making
lines in the air
my coffee is so
black and that’s complete
and so I must
break it. I had
so much to say
today and yet I stretched
out. I thought “62.”
That’s 8. And Cathy
said today was
a full moon. It means
everything: how I turned
my hip on the slide
and almost hurt
myself. The tray that
sat in my mother’s
house forever
is on my counter
now. Useless and like
forever. Greedy about
time these fifteen
minutes. It begins nailing
the sink like
a rattle has a finale.
Rather than allowing
me to search Doug
gently cut me off.
And this is enough.
The check could’ve been
larger. I wanted you
to be charmed by
how she lived with the plants
and the clocks
in the house. My insane
devotion to my
mother. I will not call
her. To thank her
on this day, an 8. No
I am enjoying
my rattling coffee
the sound of the knife
its drips really slicing
time which is
sound as whole
as I know. I understand
my perfect love
for you and this
is apart from that too.
Coffee like a black
pen on my birthday
a sound that is making lines
a hand that will fill
them. I deposit
my check. I say
thank you mother.

-Eileen Myles

Read the Rumpus Review of Eileen Myles’s Snowflake / different streets.

If you like what the Rumpus is doing for National Poetry Month, you’ll probably like this multimedia anthology of original poems we’ve run at The Rumpus over the last three years. Check it out!

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• National Poetry Month Day 30: “The Museum of Flight” by Kazim Ali

“…When you admit the presence of a choosing, intervening mind in your writing, if the writing itself lurches a little, stops and starts at irregular intervals, and if in that same time you also look at something ugly or sad for too long—be it femaleness or queerness or age, or poverty—well, people will very likely have to put your book down and you with it. That was something a lot of people embraced when they started out—the looming possibility of disaster or obscurity.”

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The cover of Sonic Youth’s Goo was a drawing by Raymond Pettibon that looked something like a panel from a comic book: a man and an androgynous-looking woman, both with sunglasses, the woman holding a cigarette in her right hand. Above them, to the right, was a paragraph which told part of a story, not all of a story, about murder and running away. The back cover was another drawing, a woman using a cloth to clean a man’s face, and the words “Nothing … lipstick, a little blood.” I don’t remember why I bought the album in the first place: I had never heard their music. All I had to go on was a half-remembered mention in a music magazine and the strange, opaque cover.

The music was only slightly less opaque: “Tunic (Song For Karen)” told a story about a dead singer, with the implication I should know who this “Karen” was.  ”Scooter and Jinx” was nothing but a pair of guitars making noises, “Mildred Pierce” started out just fine, if a little boring, but ended with a man screaming “Mildred Pierce.” Even “Kool Thing,” the closest Sonic Youth has ever come to a hit single, isn’t exactly transparent. Why is the verbally fluent Chuck D reduced to catch phrases and non sequiturs? What are we to think of this kool thing? How is he going to liberate Kim Gordon from male, white, corporate oppression?

Whatever this music did, it did not rock—well, it did rock, sometimes, but it didn’t just rock, and when it rocked it didn’t rock for long. Sonic Youth is pop music, but it’s avant-garde pop. After they’ve rocked for a while, they make some noise ; after they’ve made some noise, they rock a little more.

In her novel Inferno Eileen Myles says Pettibon’s drawings seem to make references to other, unknown texts. That certainly works to describe his cover drawings for Goo. Because they seem like panels from a comic book, because they told part of a story but not all of a story, I assumed they came from a longer story. Myles’ description also describes Sonic Youth. Their lyrics are not self-contained; they are elliptical and ambiguous and ironic. Knowing who Mildred Pierce is does not help me understand why Thurston Moore would end the song screaming her name. What could an 18-year-old make of “I am airless, a vacuum child” or “Waking up, I see you dreaming of a drive-in?”

Pop music tends to be hot, or at least warm: hot with desire, or hot with rage, or warm with happiness, or warm with love, or hot with bluster or threats. As original and new as Nirvana was, Bleach still made perfect sense to that teenage me: it was loud, angry, and it rocked. Verse, chorus, verse.

Sonic Youth is cool, not hot, and I had nowhere to put it, no way to approach it. So I listened to Goo a few more times, but it sat neglected, more or less, until I went to college in 1991.

A year or two later, I met Christine, who was older than me and knew much more about music. Through her I heard about most of the music I liked in those years: the Gits, Beat Happening, Royal Trux, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Boss Hog, Unwound, the Pixies. She called the first tape she made for me “History of Grunge,” which served as an index to a ton of music I’d never heard. She inspired me to buy CDs or records of some of those bands—she even gave me a beat-up old record player she’d decorated with letter stickers to spell out “PUNK ROCK.” She made me tapes of others.

When I told Christine I owned Goo but didn’t listen to it much, she made me a Sonic Youth mixtape. There were a couple Ciccone Youth songs, from their silly and unnecessary album of covers by people like Madonna and Robert Palmer. There were tracks from Sister and Daydream Nation and Confusion is Sex. “Expressway to Yr Skull” (also called “Madonna, Sean and Me”) was probably on there, going from anthem to loud, swirling noise to quiet plodding noise over seven minutes. I’d later own an 18-minute live version of that one. I don’t remember all the songs, but I do remember the first two were “Intro” and “Brave Men Run (In My Family),” from Bad Moon Rising.

Those two songs made mundane tasks like walking to class, taking the bus to work or pre-night-of-drinking chain-smoking seem much more epically awesome and heroic. They build and build to a peak until the tension lifts, and, on the latter, there’s Kim Gordon singing, “Brave men run, in my family,” sounding more like a threat than a pun, until the tune eventually collapses into noise.

Gordon was around 30 when she recorded these, and I was about 20 when I first heard them. She sounded like someone who, like, knew things. Her voice was deep and mocking and, well, sexy: like she was enticing you and daring you and you knew that when you got there she was just going to make fun of you or convince you to do something fatally stupid.

There’s this Sonic Youth t-shirt with a cassette tape and crossbones on the front and a cassette labeled “Sonik Youth” on the back; its ribbon of music pulled out of the cassette in a tangled, irrecoverable mess. Sonic Youth couldn’t have known that this mix tape Christine made me was the best possible introduction to their music, but they could know that there were others: other mixtapes, other friends giving other mixtapes to other friends.

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Inferno blazes and roams, lighting up moments in Myles’—or rather “Myles’”—broke young existence in late-20^th-century New York, finding her way as a poet, drinking too much, loving her dog, having sex with wrong people and right ones, discovering queerness, peeing in Goethe’s yard, and making a life as an artist. It is a book full of mischief and wisdom and crankiness and insight and humor. Says John Ashbery: “zingingly funny.” Alison Bechdel: “I was completely stupefied by Inferno in the best of ways.” Me, I had to stop writing down great lines because they were happening on almost every page. (“A poet is a person with a very short attention span who actually decides to study it.” Art is “boredom, turned electric.” Etc.)

At the AWP conference in Washington, DC this past January, we sat down with coffee and talked at high speed for over an hour. Here’s the essence of it.

***

The Rumpus: When the book opens, you’re writing an inferno for your English class in college. Dante had to write Inferno as a poem, but for your own inferno, you chose prose. I was curious about that choice.

Eileen Myles: Part of it was just a liftoff from the work of the last novel I had written, Cool for You. When I was publishing that book, showing it to editors, people were like, “Who is she?” Like, “Why?” Because nonfiction sort of demands that the person has a certain level of celebrity, otherwise you’re not permitted to talk about yourself. You know? And often a book is spurred by a joke I have with myself. So I thought, Well, the next time they ask that question, I’ll say it’s about the poet Eileen Myles, and my next novel will be about such a person. And that way the book will answer the question.

Which of course they no longer asked by the time this book was going around to editors. So really, I just thought, I’ll write a novel about being a poet, so that will be a self-explanatory, self-marketing device.

Rumpus: You call it “A Poet’s Novel” instead of say, a memoir. Even though it’s about “Eileen Myles” and I presume much of the content is autobiographical.

Myles: For me the focus is on the fact that it’s a piece of writing, it’s a work of art, it’s not a personal—it’s not bursting out of my chest with a need to tell a story. It’s out of the impulse to make art. It’s an aesthetic action, not a personal divulsion.

Rumpus: The book hooked me right away, but not the way a novel usually does—by pulling me into a specific time and place and setting and all that, because this zigzags around in all these ways—but in the way you capture writing and being a writer. I  recommended it to one of my students who just graduated, and then I thought, I wonder if it will get her in the same way it got me?

Myles: I totally meant it to be kind of how-to book for a young female. I really loved the opportunity to keep returning to this younger me, at the outset in these various ways, thinking about work, thinking about writing, thinking about sexuality, each one of those journeys being told slightly differently and intermingling. I wanted it to be sort of a gift between generations.

I think the story of a woman becoming a writer is a female coming-of-age. The whole sexual coming-of-age that they usually use for men is like, going to a prostitute, or something. [In Inferno] the irony of somewhat being a prostitute in the first section is the flip side of that. That’s not the story of how this narrator becomes a writer, but it’s along the way. The story of becoming a writer is a coming-to-power sexual narrative. It’s about not selling something.

Rumpus: Later on you delve again into the uneasy relationship between art and commerce, or art and poverty. The “economic drag” that the middle- and upper-class aspiring artist dons. And the wealthy patrons who kind of “collect” artists that they admire: “You occupy their huge interesting spaces either in casual living time or for specific events and then you are part of how they relax. You’re like an animal roaming around their house, but you’ve got to be you, since they chose you… It was the being-collected moment.”

Myles: Exactly. We’ll put this poet on our property, it’ll be like an installation… You define that in the same way that having a certain kind of dog on your estate defines your estate.

Rumpus: Dante’s Inferno is a tour of hell—

Myles: And also he wrote it from the position of being banished. He wrote it in a place that was not his home. And I wrote it in San Diego. I really was very careful to not talk about the academy. Being a professor, I felt like, what do I do with this in the narrative of this poet’s life? So I deliberately excluded it. But [San Diego] was the setting that allowed me to go to all these places mentally and as a writer. That seemed really important that I felt banished from my own existence. And so I could write such a book.

Rumpus: What about the hell aspect? In Inferno you write about very trying times in many ways, but it’s also quite wonderful. So I wondered, are you playing with the idea of hell as this hedonistic place—

Myles: Yes.

Rumpus: I also couldn’t help thinking of how queers are supposed to be burning in hell anyway so, you know, this might be what it’s like.

Myles: Yeah, I think we’re always a little bit in hell. It’s a mixture of things, right, it’s sort of all around us. Like how hot New York is in the summer. Or an intense, wonderful, hard, hard relationship could be hell, and you think, I will stay here forever, because I love you. Watching somebody die is hell, but you know you’re in the holiest place you’ve ever been. So I think part of the growing-up idea is learning to love hell.

Which is the occupation of being a writer. Because it’s such an insecure existence. We’re wallpapering existence while we’re in it and trying to make a living doing that.

Rumpus: I love the part where you’re at MoMA with Rene Ricard, looking at an Arthur Dove painting:

“I’m not gay he said with his hands in his pockets. I’m not gay at all, he said. Are you? No, I said. Who would want that. I shook my head. I think it’s horrible. I’m not happy. I’m never happy. I’m sad. I like queer better. We’re queer. This is what we get. We have all these beautiful things. He waved his hand at everything there. These are ours. We stood a moment in Rene’s church.”

To me that touches back on what you’re saying about hell, about the hard and the beautiful being inextricable from each other.

Walker Evans

Myles: And queer suffering being an aesthetic statement….What writing is not queer? Literally and metaphorically. Obviously so much of the canon, or what everybody is reading and has always been reading, is queer writing—that’s just what the history of literature is, pretty much. Stein and Wilde and Whitman and Dickinson—we just are the history of literature. Proust, and on and on and on, I’m looking at all these pictures at [the Hide/Seek exhibit at] the National Gallery and I’m like, Really? All these painters were queer? It’s astonishing. Marsden Hartley? And Walker Evans? Was Walker Evans queer? I’m not sure but it was a little suggestive and heartbreaking and beautiful.

Rumpus: It makes sense since arts have long provided a sort of haven from the heteronormative timeline that’s imposed upon everyone else. But that’s interesting that you mention all those writers, because the queerness in their work is also sort of sublimated, it’s not that explicit. It’s stuff we know after the fact. It’s coded. When kids read it in high school, they’re not like, “Oh.” They don’t necessarily know until somebody tells them later.

Myles: At UC San Diego they have all these Christian kids from Orange County who didn’t get into Berkeley or UCLA. It was one of the big UCs, but it wasn’t the one you really wanted to go to, so they were just there with their suburban ideas, and when I gave them a piece of writing by Dodie Bellamy, they just were outraged! It was a short novella called “Fat Chance” and it was about an internet romance with a very fat guy, and his fatness was part of the sexuality, and that was the queerness. They found it so repulsive.  And I thought, What you guys don’t like is the non-homogeneous sexuality. That’s what queer is. And it really reiterated that first definition of queer, which didn’t mean that you had to be gay, it just mean that your sexuality was non-conventional and you felt it deeply. You bonded with other outcasts.

Rumpus: It’s like your definition of lesbianism in here: “it’s not a thing, it’s just unbridled lust.”

Myles: That was fun to write. I think that the thing that’s so funny and weird about lesbian sexuality is the way that it registers or doesn’t register for people. They just can’t wrap their minds around two women wanting what everybody should be trying to get away from, which is just the fact of being a woman. “Don’t you want to not be a woman?” And I don’t mean become masculine, but it’s like we’re supposed to devalue our female-ness, and you can’t quite get away from the fact that you’re admitting that you actually want and are deeply into it.

I had plenty of sex with men growing up and there was a sense of needing to conform to male desire and who you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to be doing. There are unique men who actually are really into female sexuality and want to know what women like and enjoy that, but mostly that’s not it. I think being a lesbian is claiming that space as this wild space that you’re deeply interested in. That’s the wilderness you’re staking your claim in. And I think that’s why it’s so hard—you’re often this tiny boat in the ocean with this other woman and if there’s a storm, you know the world is not with you on this choice. So it’s like, Why would you do that? Why would you want to go away from the thing that’s great powerful and valuable?

Rumpus: You expressed some reservation about the identity “lesbian” in Inferno too. “And I was pulling on my clothes. It seemed like the clouds were laughing at me. In their majestic, gleaming beauty. I had always felt kind of tough, but now I was just a faggot. That was it. I felt like a gay man. I didn’t feel any stronger being a lesbian.” It is a complicated word.

Myles: I get it all the time, you know for years. I’ll say something about “that’s because we’re lesbians,” and then a friend will say, “I don’t think of myself that way anymore, I feel more like a man sometimes.” And I’m like, “Well I feel that way too!” Or somebody I know who’s femme, I’ll say something about us as lesbians and she’ll say, “Well, I’ve been dating trans men, so actually I’m a straight woman now.” It’s really interesting, and it’s funny, that then a part of me wants to dig my heels in and say, No, I am a lesbian in fact.

But it’s just like any other lid, it sometimes feels a little bit tight and not right.

Rumpus: Speaking of sex and sexuality, at the end of Inferno you go into very detailed descriptions of various women’s anatomy and sex. At first it seemed almost gaudy, there’s something over the top about it, the sheer amount of detail—

Myles: —It’s meant to be gaudy!

Rumpus:—Right! And there’s this persistence about it that becomes insistent, and it’s like you’re claiming some sort of space, a new space. Can you talk about that section and why you went there?

Myles: Yeah, well there’s a couple of things. One just occurred to me, that there’s this trope in visual art by women and by feminists where everybody has this moment where they do pussies. They do paintings of vaginas or photographs of vaginas or menstrual spots in art school, there’s all this vagina art.  And I thought, I have never seen that in writing. I have seen so many men write about women’s bodies and women’s anatomy, but I had never seen a female writer do it like that so I just thought, I’m going to make wallpaper. Pussy wallpaper. Everything I remember—write it until I can write no more. That was my intention.

And I wound up weirdly more influenced by Virgil—there’s one chapter in the Aeneid which is the description of Achilles’ shield, and it’s a pattern narrative. And I sort of thought, that was my shield.

Also it was meant to be the abundance, because I think I had the quintessential first sexual experience that was so bad and so painful and so uncomfortable, and I kind of wanted there to be an explosive flip side to that so it wasn’t the abject narrative where the sad lesbian has a bad time sexually and that’s where we leave her.

Rumpus: Do you want to talk a little bit about [your pit bull] Rosie? In the acknowledgments you thank her for rerouting your existence.

Myles: She could be one of the Virgils of the book, she’s such a presence in there. And in the time that I lived with that dog, she was such a presence in my poetry because she just changed the way I moved through the world, who was in it. She was always in it.

As soon as I got a dog, every time I made a decision that was good for Rosie it was good for me. She brought me to nature in a way. That summer where I was in the Pennsylvania house was actually the summer of finishing Chelsea Girls, and I didn’t get into an artist colony, and I was like oh no, and so I knew that I needed to be someplace beautiful and natural with my dog and that would be the ideal writing space. It became this whole relationship that changed my world.

Rumpus: What do you think about the influence of academia on poetry and vice versa?

Myles: I think it should spur conversation like the art world has, which they call institutional critique. I think as writers we should be criticizing the academy more than we do. I think people see it as a necessary evil and a way to make money. But you know, I think that the values of the academy are not the same values as those of most writers and artists.

The structure of the institution doesn’t serve us. I didn’t get a Ph.D., I don’t know how to talk in academic meetings. The way it was set up in my department [at UCSD] was that most of the teaching of writing was done by adjuncts and there were only a few tenured faculty. Which meant that those of us who were writers who were tenured faculty had so much administrative work because adjuncts can’t do it. It also meant that we had, like, twenty adjuncts who didn’t have any power to vote in the department. Even though there were more undergraduate writing majors than anything else in the literature department, we had less power than anyone else. So we were babysitters.

And they didn’t take us as a serious discipline. I would see these academics, if they had to be on an honors panels where someone submitted a manuscript as an honors thesis, and some academic had to look at poetry, they’d say, “What? I can’t read that.” They would literally sneer at it. And they regarded our grades as inflated. It was such a total class system between us and them. It was their institution, they understood it, they knew how to run it and they weren’t going to let us in. But we were bringing in the undergraduates. The arts were the most popular major! And I think all these writing programs are cash cows.

Rumpus: Chelsea Girls is out of print and I had to pay $30 to get it used. What’s the story with that?

Myles: The guy who ran Black Sparrow was a millionaire, mostly thanks to Charles Bukowski. But I think that what publishing was becoming—when Borders would refer to publishers as “partners”— John Martin, the guy who started it in the 60s, was a great publisher, wonderful to deal with, but he just didn’t want to become that. So he just pulled the plug on it and sold Bukowksi and Paul Bowles and John Fante, who were the big sellers to Ecco, who did their own Black Sparrow imprint. They tried to sell me, Ed Sanders and Andrei Codrescu, but they didn’t buy us, we were the next tier.

It’s a little hard, because I don’t want to be stuck, I don’t want to give the copyright to someone that I’m uncomfortable with. So a number of people have asked to publish it, and what I keep waiting for is a publisher that I’m excited about. That was the plan with this book, but I’m always too weird. With fiction I’ve always had agents who are always like, “Of course you’ll be able to sell this book!” And then people are so weird about my work. With Chelsea Girls it was like, “These stories just kinda crumble, they don’t, you know… arc.” Or, “They kind of deteriorate.” And I was like, Yes! Yes.

I’ve had a few editors in the mainstream who have been interested. They’ll say to me—and this is even in the ’90s when I had published a lot of books—they’d say,”We’ll have to work very closely with you because it’s a first book.” It’s like, you’re kidding. So what I felt time and again is what I’m being told is they’re going to help me fix my work. Fix that bad English. Make those stories pop up at the end.

It’s not worth it to me to work so long on a book and then just let somebody destroy it. So I keep being with good independent publishers and each time I write a book I’ll think, well certainly an editor could get this book as-is. And it comes close sometimes, but generally it’s just their advertising and marketing people who think lesbian and not new, because I’ve had a reputation, I think I’m on this shelf already.

Rumpus: So there’s wariness on both sides.

Andrei Codrescu

Myles: Yeah. But my thought continues to be that when there’s a publisher—and you know it could be an independent press—that I feel that I will just always stick with these guys, I’ll publish Chelsea Girls. So it’s tricky, but I’m just being protective.

And my next book is a dog book so there seems to be a lot of interest.

Rumpus: Do tell.

Myles: It purports to be a nonfiction book but it’s actually a huge work of fiction. It’s called My Dog: A Memoir, but it’s going to be Rosie’s far-reaching destinies. Who she was, who she will be, how the dog relates as a kind of cosmology. Cause you know when you have a pet you make up all this shit, right? We have all these jokes about who this really is.

I always thought Rosie was my dad. My dad died when I was eleven, and I thought he would totally want to come back. And she always felt like him. So I just thought, Well, I’ll explore that. I don’t know, it’s still a thing where people get excited so there are several editors who are like, Dog book! But when they see my dog book they might have other thoughts.

Rumpus: One of the first things I fell in love with about Inferno, and found also in Chelsea Girls, is that you’re just like, Fuck the comma, I’m just going to put it in whenever I feel like it. Tell me your feelings about the comma.

Myles: I’m very visual about it. I sort of think of it as a pause, but mostly I feel it kind of ruins the sentence. I read Gertrude Stein’s Lectures in America, which is just my favorite book of hers, and she was very clear that the period is the only punctuation worth using. Everything else, it should be in the sentence! If the sentence is a question, it should be in the structure of the sentence.

So I do love to use punctuation in a comic book-y way. When I want it to be loud, I have a loud question mark at the end. I like the pop quality to a question mark, so I only use it when it seems to radiate on that visual level. Commas, I guess I do use commas, but I know, I make copy editors crazy. Also the uppercase/lowercase—part of that was a class thing I was responding to, to not make the titles of things be apart from the flow of the book.

Actually, you know, when I was writing Chelsea Girls, I had a girlfriend and it was the ’70s and we lived in the East Village and we drank a huge amount and it was right at this early, super-8 boom in the East Village, all these films being made, and we wanted to make films. So we’d talk all the time about the films we were going to make. She had a little camera. We were just so broke and so fucked up that it was sort of like the drinking and the talking about the film was the thing we were doing. I think once we made like a three-minute film and we couldn’t even tell when it was stopping and when it was starting and it took us a year to develop it, you know, it just—these were leaps. So someplace in there, the first story I wrote in Chelsea Girls was the story called “Bread and Water,” and I thought, I’m just going to make a film. I’m going to act as if this [story] is a film, I’m going to act like I’m recording and I’m going to just get the sound and the sights, so the punctuation seemed beside the point, the camera’s on. And words will be as we hear words. It’s just a recording, there’s no punctuation because we’re just you know—preserving it in this very old-fashioned way.

Rumpus: There’s a pleasing audacity to it. Which I kind of attribute to your being a poet as well as a prose writer. That in poetry there’s not the pressure to have this immaculate punctuation all the time.

Myles: There’s a lot more freedom extended, yeah. And I do feel that it’s not over yet. The idea that it’s determined that the English language works this way, not that way, and these words can’t be reinvented, that words can’t be rethought. Like “cause.” I’ve written, and I’ve given a talk at CUNY, on the word “cause.” …In the Steinian way, do we need be before cause? And I do, I’ll let the syllables roll, sometimes I want that extra syllable, I’ll say because, but I’m not trying to be kiddish when I say “cause,” I just feel it’s cause, it’s a conjunction, it operates, we’re just saying. But I really had fights with my publisher, this particular publisher [O/R], over that one.

Rumpus: To me it seems like such a central part of the package, I can’t imagine the language all “cleaned up.”

Myles: I know! And still every now and then—I just got a review, and it was a really good review and at the end I felt like—it’s so interesting when somebody’s loving your work and they quote, and as soon as they stop loving your work they sort of refer to these sort of stinky things that occur in the text someplace but they don’t use quotes anymore. And I’m like, What’s she talking about, nouns that don’t connect to antecedents?  It felt very classist. I was like, This just doesn’t quite sync here. It was odd. And I thought, that’s interesting.

I think it’s more middle-class than upper-class, these huge class-bound things about the English language and the page and what we must do. Because I’ve noticed in journalism—I tell poets, if you want to have real battle around style, do journalism and try and change the sentence. People who went to good colleges are really afraid that people will think they’re stupid if they tamper with punctuation or spelling or anything like that. It’s like a dignity issue, and it’s really weird and even an implication that You don’t know.

And so I’ve had incredibly condescending— at this point, I kind of don’t know, because I’ve done it my way for so long that if I’m doing journalism I know they’re going to fix things. By and large, they’re not going to let me get away with some stuff, and if they love my writing they will. But mostly I’ll let people put in all the commas they want, I could care less.

Rumpus: You alluded to capitalization too as being a class thing.

Myles: It started with the word “catholic,” where nothing as an ex-Catholic is so much fun as letting catholic be lower case. Or have god be lowercase. Just tiny expressions of belief or disbelief. And the title, that kind of ownership that’s attached to the title of something, for that to vanish, and for it just to be another word in a sea of words, it’s very liberating.

The thing is it’s fiction, so we get to be in utopias of language here, and we get to change things, and I think that’s where the big excitement and the freedom of the palette of the page is.

Rumpus: One more thing is that I love the strikethroughs in section two, which purports to be an extended grant proposal. Ambitious unambitious, who’s asking these questions anyhow, running for president being confusing impressive. Wanting to jam your fist in her like a big cookie.

Myles: I was trying to be sparing with them so they wouldn’t be like this kooky wow joke, but I did want it to be like, how many ways can you say that this is purporting to be a grant application, so we’re looking over the person’s shoulder, I felt like this is a performance of sorts. But it was fun to tweak those little moments.

Rumpus: It creates this kind of delicious sense of impropriety, but then you’ve left it in, so the reader feels in on the secret.

Myles: Yeah, that’s my hope.

Rumpus: My last question is not so much about the book but a larger gay question. The big gay cause now is marriage. What do you think about the politics of that?

Myles: I think that marriage is an institution for everybody. I’m a little bit appalled by the phrase “gay marriage.” Is there marriage or is there not marriage? Are there citizens or are there not citizens? It’s a categorical question that I think is really appalling. Do we have the right to this institution? Why don’t we? I’m an adult. I’m sixty. I pay taxes. I guess I feel that way. And you know, when I was running for president in the ’90s my thing was “Abolish marriage for everybody.” Now what I feel is have it for everybody. The law should just be expanded.

Rumpus: Why do you think that changed for you?

Myles: I think I was just having fun then. It was a radical way to say the same thing. I really do think the thing is, friends should be able to get married. Groups of people should be able to get married, as long as it’s an economic unit. And the church should just get the fuck away from it—they can have their marriages, nobody’s stopping them, but it’s this very legal part of it, it should be any union, any unit should be allowable in the same way that anyone can own a corporation.

Rumpus: One thing that sometimes worries me about the gay marriage movement is that it tends to posit this super “normal” monogamous couple who just wants their own version of a straight family, except gay.

Myles: I think we have deeper problems as queer people in a culture that increasingly prefers norms of all sorts and is totally into homogeny. That’s our deeper issue.

Rumpus: Which is weird in the so-called information age. Theoretically we should have so many more options available to everybody—or at least knowledge thereof. At a younger age.

Myles: But options are now being used as ways to know how to stay away from what you don’t want to be near. You know?  And I think that beyond the pie charts of VIDA and all that is, Where is queerness in all this? That’s not even touched on. Or race. Really, these are deeply segregated, deeply heterosexual institutions. … I don’t want to be published by a female press. I don’t want to be published by a gay press. I want my gay work to get into your space.

**

Photo of Eileen Myles by Leopoldine Core.

Related Posts:

• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poetry Wars
• Genre Resistance
• The Body Place Is a Thinking Place
• National Poetry Month Day 13: “15 Minutes” by Eileen Myles
• Eileen Myles on Inferno

**

The Rumpus: You’ve written two collections of short stories and two novels. In some ways, I could see the premise for The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake working as a short story, but it works beautifully as a novel. What were the origins of this idea, and how did you know it was going to be a novel and not a short story?

Aimee Bender: I had been writing pages about food that had something extra attached to it for a while—had a character obsessed with the warmth of soup in a piece that never went anywhere. I also have a good friend who talks about feelings as something to digest or process, and although I didn’t really make the link consciously, I think the similarity to food—these food words attached to emotional life—made sense to me. The first chunk, about 90 pages, I wrote quickly, and that was all about figuring out the rules of her food “power.” But I knew there was more in there, and her brother became really important to me, and really unsettling to write about, and I just felt clearly that the two were linked even though I wasn’t sure exactly why or how for awhile.

Rumpus: In your writing process, how do you approach these two forms—the novel and the short story—differently?

Bender: With a novel there’s a kind of open-endedness that feels rambly with me for a while. I don’t know where the longer story is, or what I can write about for pages and pages. There’s so much hit or miss.  A story feels more tightly reined—like even the sentences are driving towards something a bit faster, even if I also don’t know where I’m going. These initial cake pages, even the very first bits of them, felt longer, stretchier, more scene-based than a story might.

Rumpus: At the beginning of the book, you quote from The Physiology of Taste: “Food is all the substances which, submitted to the action of the stomach, can be assimilated or changed into life by digestion, and can thus repair the losses which the human body suffers through the act of living.” This is a fascinating quote and really gets at the idea that eating is inherently tied to the human experience. Emotion seems to be something that connects all of our experiences as well. How do you see the relationship between homemade food and emotion working in this novel?

Bender: I love this book by Brillat-Savarin—it’s full of quotes like this, of ways to take food and make it bigger/more complex than usual. Sections called “The Sensation of Taste” or “The Erotic Properties of Truffles.” He has a section on Death, another on Dreams. He is interested in how food impacts us in every possible way. I saw it on a table at a restaurant in an underground cave in Cambridge, kind of a reading spot for people as they waited for a table, and I was immediately drawn to it. For the book, I wasn’t thinking coherently about the link between food and emotion while writing, but after the book was done, I could think about both as two different types of things we take in, one solid, one ephemeral, and it made my job easier as a writer to concretize the feelings in the family that were unexpressed by putting them in the food.

Rumpus: Also, food and emotion seem to be especially profound when considered in the context of family. Food brings families together, and we’re connected emotionally to our family perhaps more than most other people in our lives. In this book we learn a great deal about Rose’s family, and come to care about them as much as we do the narrator. What makes family such a rich subject for literature?

Bender: I think family’s the first group we know and probably the group we know best. And family systems theory—that stuff is incredible. There’s a quote I love from a book I read years ago, about family systems, “sometimes children will play out the conflicts of their great-grandparents.” I mean, come on! We talk about psychological patterns a lot as if they’re ordinary or no big deal, but when you really think of patterns writ large like that, over generations, played out unbeknownst to the players, it blows my mind. It is scary, thrilling, and fascinating to me. And also what I also love about that is the psychological statement and basic tenet that what is not looked at will show up another way. I have always found that idea compelling, even in stages of my life when I was not looking at anything in any depth at all. So families are one of the clearest ways we can see that happen, the “nurture” lab.

Rumpus: You frequently write from the perspective of kids or teenagers, which is interesting because these voices are often absent from literary fiction. What do you love about young narrators? Is there something about this perspective that allows you to do things you can’t do with an adult narrator?

Bender: I know, a lot of people really don’t care for younger narrators but I’ve never understood that; as a reader, I really like a kid’s POV and when writers really submerge themselves in that limitation, often there are such rewards. I just reread The Sound and the Fury, (which was kind of like reading it for the first time since it was a high school assignment years ago and I think I took in about two pages of the whole) and the Benji passages are so amazing to read, really stunning, because of how deeply Faulkner is able to skip over the ways we see the world and show a new view. How light looks, how flowers look. He’s not a kid, but he’s also a kid. I love Cruddy, Lynda Barry’s fantastic novel, because of how she nails a teenager’s voice, and it’s true in her comics as well. She rearranges sentence order in such a totally pleasing way. Also I really like listening to how kids speak in general, so when a writer can capture a young voice realistically, I appreciate being reminded of those voices.

Rumpus: In your writing, you often juxtapose disparate elements, like a humorous tone with sad content, or magical elements with realistic situations. This adds a lot of depth to your work, and I’ve always felt that it makes your writing feel very unexpected. How do these elements come together for you?

Bender: Thanks! You know, it’s not really planned, but I think juxtaposition in general can be so interesting. I just saw a good friend’s dance piece at UCLA—his name’s Barak Marshall and I think he’s coming up to SF soon. Anyway, he had placed, downstage, a couple of men sharing a pair of high heels who had draped a dress over their shoulders together and I’m explaining it badly, but they were sort of visually forming a woman between them. It was very funny, a very good theatrical visual play. But in back, stage left, were two women moving quietly and gracefully, with slow, contrasting movement. So in the front was this very slapsticky routine, and then it was changed and modified by the grace of the background movement. And just seeing that is a permission-giver. It reminds us, viscerally, how we are never one thing. How experiences are never one thing. Or I think of someone like Jane Siberry, a singer I really admire, because she will have sometimes bizarrely absurdist lyrics but they are set to heavenly sounding music and the two together create some kind of tension/opening. In terms of magic—I think the magic is one of the ways I can access more realism, because for whatever reason, if I have to write about something directly, I feel more inhibited.

Rumpus: You live in Los Angeles, which is also where The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is set. Can you tell us a little about the LA literary scene? How is it different from New York, or San Francisco?

Bender: Yes, it’s fun to discuss. I haven’t lived in NYC so I can’t really compare but what’s really nice about LA is that fiction is far and away NOT the dominant form so everyone is an underdog and very supportive of one another. Everyone here is a screenwriter instead, so when I’ve said I’m a writer, that’s what most people assume. Once I was at a party, and a TV writer sort of looked at me mournfully when he heard I was a fiction writer. He said, that’s a real writer, and I felt like that was kind of a bummer to hear, because of course there’s amazing writing happening on TV these days. But then he explained himself: you get to keep your copyright, he said. And that brought it home to me, in a new way—what a hard thing that must be. But also they get tons more money, too, so it’s a trade-off. I lived in San Francisco for a while and the writing world there also felt really lively and good but didn’t have that same underdog, almost arbitrary, feeling of LA—there’s just something about being willfully outside the dominant writing industry that I like.

Rumpus: What other Los Angeles writers should we be reading?

Bender: Other LA writers (or writers who live in LA)—this is a short list and I’m forgetting many but: Percival Everett, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Mark Danielewski, Maile Meloy, Diana Wagman, Amy Gerstler, Benjamin Weissman, Danzy Senna, and Jim Krusoe! Jim Krusoe is undersung and a wonderful strange fabulist. No one quite like him. He has a new book just out.

Rumpus: Your writing feels very personal, and you have a knack for writing about extraordinary characters or fantastic events, while at the same time getting close to everyday human emotions, which we can all connect to. Do you think about your audience (or any audience) when you are writing?

Bender: Thank you—that’s just what I would hope for. My relationship to the idea of audience has changed in the last few years. I don’t think of anyone specific while writing, and I don’t want to get caught up in imagining what a reader might think because I do think that can get distracting. But I just think it has become clearer to me that writing is making a vessel to send to a reader. I want to write something that I connect with, and I’ll work on it as long as I can, and make the vessel itself as clearly as I can, but then sending it out is key. Then we meet on the page, invisibly. That duet, and the beauty of it, is clearer to me, and kind of amazing to me. Zadie Smith has an essay on the value of a good reader, and she gives a reader enormous dignity in how she talks about it. We sometimes pretend it’s all the writer performing, and the reader as passive recipient/admirer. But no—the reader is stepping up and joining; the reader has to put herself on the line as well.

Rumpus: As a teacher at the University of Southern California, you must read a lot of works-in-progress and encounter a wide variety of styles. Have you seen any trends among the aspiring writers that you work with? Any predictions about what American literature will look like in the next twenty or thirty years?

Bender: Great question, though I don’t know if I have a good answer for you. It’s very fun to see the styles change, or to see who is being read most intensely. Last year was Bolano and David Foster Wallace—this year I’m not sure yet. Their writing styles are all over the place, but they are definitely interested in strong voices.

Rumpus: What are you reading these days? What was the last book that surprised you?

Bender: I read Never Let Me Go last fall and it surprised me and unsettled me deeply; the emotional power there built very slowly and steadily and insistently and when I finished it, I couldn’t sleep. And, in a way that I really like, it was difficult to pinpoint why. I’m also reading and loving Eileen Myles’s book Inferno which is about her time becoming a poet in NYC in the 70’s and it’s so honest and genuine and the voice is really inviting and great. She talks about hearing Patti Smith and I then read Just Kids which I also loved but I think the two should be talked about together more—Myles’s book is more under the radar but equally compelling, just with a very different feel in the long, sparky, wild sentences vs. Smith’s more meditative, lovingly-crafted voice.

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