“In New York City’s Madison Square Park, hundreds of people attended a ‘Free University’ hosted by Occupy Wall Street, where professors gave free classes to May Day protesters.” There’s also a transcript of the video. Happy learning!
Can we make this happen in 2012? Or maybe an Obama/Myles ticket? (We took this picture from Brandon Stosuy’s Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992.)
Please! Keep
reading me
Blake
because you’re going to make
me the greatest
poet of
all time
Keep smoothing
the stones in the
driveway
let me fry an egg
on your ass
& I’ll pick up
the mail.
I feel your
absence in
the morning
& imagine your
instant mouth
let me move
in with you—
Travelling
wrapping your limbs
on my back
I grow man woman
Child
I see wild wild wild
Keep letting the
day be massive
Unlicensed
Oh please have
my child
I’m a little
controlling
Prose has some
Magic. Morgan
had a
whore in
her lap. You
Big fisherman
I love my
Friends.
I want to lean
my everything
with you
make home for your hubris
I want to read the words you circld over and over again
A slow skunk walking across the road
Yellow, just kind
of pausing
picked up the warm
laundry. I just saw a coyote
tippy tippy tippy
I didn’t tell you about the creature with hair
long hair, it was hit by cars on the highway
Again and again. It had long grey hair
It must’ve been a dog; it could’ve been
Ours. Everyone loses their friends.
I couldn’t tell anyone about this sight.
Each defeat
Is sweet.
a squiggle of a river
becomes a road
in a play a boy
might walk
around a lot
and a woman
might be still.
Something in the water
might look like
brains
when the boy’s
just sitting
there being
young; day
the moment might oc-
cur in memory
sentiment
I know musicians
know certain
chords do this
or that
we’re a bunch
of turtles
when it comes
to feelings
the woman
is still and the
world around
her darkens
and we get
it—just
before the
boy started
walking. I wish the playwright
was brave.
to stay in that
corny suggestion
darkness
means
sadness
means time.
It’s just our
burning star
and our
blue dirt
turning in its circle
a stand-in
for emotion
for scientists: you.
Who promised
to bring her
binoculars
somewhere, now here to this grand
play. Just to
discover
art makes
me look
long & hard.
Why is light
so damn emotional
if it’s just
a burning star.
This toe,
an inch
“The presence of the poem is the correlative of the place that isn’t.”
My review of Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) is up on PANK.
(still v. excited about this whole reviewing thing. Books!)
Imagine you come into a room all wooden and light, say it’s a bar, or an old converted church. You’ve come in out of the NYC street (LES or East or West Village) into this space; there’s Eileen Myles, sitting at the head of the great oak table. She’s reading from her book to a crowd you cannot see, but know are there. Only, she isn’t just reading; she’s pulling a thread, a thick gleaming wet copper strand of the parallel New York you have never seen and never will. She’s pulling this from out of her solar plexus, her navel, her heart, her -
—Eileen Myles (via nikkihands)
Eileen Myles
Of all the ways of forgetting
not turning the pilot on is not
the worst
The house is intact
you are floating
in time
buckets of it streaming through
the windows
youth turned it up I think
or on & fell asleep
Remembering to do.
You are too intact
the dappled sunlight on the lawn
or pots of darkness
like salt instead of depths
Still once I turned it up
the popping commenced
like applause for the present
tense
the site of my sway
Larry’s new car is wide & safe
a woman’s voice conducts
us left & right
she’s crazy he laughs
again & again
my shrink said buy it now
about the car
I told him about my phenomenal streak
of winning & when the stakes
rose I began to bid low &
not at all
I could have won; you choked
he said.
Woof. To not choke
is I suppose to experience
to hold it in & go forth
though you need the heat
The sun had not done more
suddenly for a while
it’s like we took off our skin
and said it is hot.
It’s like we sold our skin
& said where did everyone go?
when the weather’s too hot for comfort
& we can’t have ice-cream cones
it ain’t no sin
to take off your skin
& dance around in your bones
#8 (Car Camera) by Eileen Myles, from Snowflake/Different Streets
—Eileen Myles (from “Rotting Symbols”)
(Source: anathemawasteland)
