Eileen Myles: “For Now (Why I Write)”

A person who wants to be a poet should consider Eileen Myles—who is a professional poet. Eileen Myles is able to reflect a world that welcomes them. They speak about their desire to be alone and be part of a community. They say the rhythms of your home and birthplace are the rhythms of your writing voice. The “Eileen syntax” creates sentences unlike anyone else’s.

Excerpt from “For Now (Why I Write)” by Eileen Myles.

I think last year I got the beautiful bound versions

Yale published of Patti Smith and Knausgaard giv-

ing this talk and I sat in a chair in my apartment and

I took a look at each of them and at least as far as the

beginnings both of them sounded like themselves

and I thought well I certainly can do that.

When I received the invitation to give this talk,

I think it was the summer before last or maybe that

spring I was given a date and a fee and I kind of

put it at the back of my mind as something nice that

would happen the following September or October

and then in August I got in touch with Michael

because I hadn’t heard anything but it turns out

that’s because I had the wrong year. And I figure I

can start with that.

And I’ll return to it now and again. 2018’s talk

would have been different and 2019 has been a cha-

otic and exceptionally beautiful year, right, crowded

with incident (horrible) and time itself had a kind

of optic quality (full of great and awful things to

see and the year has been busy getting copied—that

way being memorable) and these are the things I’m

always feeding into my purpose which is to write

and maybe to get this part over with right away—

because I need an alibi.

I have a very definite feeling that I am simply

living and how would that be possible if you also had

a kind of ambition and fewer and fewer concrete

plans as you moved out of childhood wanting to

discharge it.

Alibi of course implies a kind of “elsewhere” and

as you translate it into many languages it remains

alibi, what’s the word for alibi in Czech. It’s alibi.

I have been arming myself with philosophies

for years that support the notion that the point is to

be here, to be present which I think is the truly hard

part, and yet I keep coming back to it, it’s undeni-

ably true and writing it turns out is the easiest way

to copy that feeling. I have been doing it for years.

I would like to be here, I think I’m here, and the

more I write, and the more you read it the more it’s

simply a fact.

So that’s pretty much done and now I’m living

here.

The second detail pertaining to the invite I

received to give this talk is that I have been living

in an apartment in New York for forty-two years so

that’s where most of my life has occurred. My liv-

ing, my thinking, my copying. It’s one of those East

Village rent stabilized apartments and my building

had just been sold in 2017 for the umpteenth time

and pretty soon after my lease was up I guess prob-

ably in June and the new landlady totally took her

time getting the new lease to me, actually all of us,

which of course spelt danger and finally I got an

email from her, my landlady, Elaine Moosey, saying

she wanted to meet each one of us to hand us our

leases and I thought that’s sweet and a few weeks

later she’s standing right there in my apartment.

She’s a conservative looking woman I bet about ten

years younger than me and as soon as she got inside

here, apartment 3C, she goes I’ll give you 75,000 to

leave. That’s a visitor right. I chuckled and rejected

her offer and she went on to say that she knows that

as well as living here in the small very inexpen-

sive apartment I also have a house in Marfa Texas.

Which is not illegal, but a fact. And that she Elaine

Moosey knows it.

I’m being watched. That was the feeling I got.

Then she asked me what I do and I said I’m a writer

I didn’t say poet which was interesting I generally do

say that because it is far more perverse people gener-

ally don’t know what a poet does but in the moment

with my landlady I also grabbed a fat book of poetry

out of a brown box sitting there right next to the

tub and I flashed it even thinking maybe it would

be nice to give her one (also wondering if there was

anything incriminating in it) and she looked right

through the two of us, my book and I, and then she

said smiling wouldn’t you rather write in Texas.

It’s always very unpredictable where you will

receive counseling in your life. There’s a philosophy

that everything is a gift. If everything were coffee

that might be true. The implication is that Elaine

Moosey my landlady is a gift. Me getting the year

wrong was a gift. And certainly I’m talking to you

the poets and writers and thinkers who are getting a

nice check today. Nobody knows what it is Donald

and Sandy have actually done by giving you this

gift. You’ll know right away of course but in some

other way you won’t know for years.

Excerpted from For Now (Why I Write) © 2021 Eileen Myles. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.