Rachel’s Team Pick:
So do you know about Emily Books? It is Emily Gould’s newest project, possibly the future? Basically you can subscribe, and every month you’ll download a book, with the understanding that this book will possibly/probably be amazing, because it’s curated by smart, great women with excellent taste. Guess what this month’s book is? You may remember it from another book club: it’s Eileen Myles’ Inferno!
That is really neat in and of itself! But it gets neater: Riese wrote about it! For you! And the whole internet. You are going to love it. That’s all. I just wanted you to know.
She has this idea that knowing herself could be a job, that being a poet is a job. Nobody wants to pay you for that at first. So you hustle to make money to buy yourself time to write. But how I feel reading Eileen Myles is that the hustle doesn’t just enable the writing, the hustle is part of the writing. The humility.That experience… But this is a big problem for women, obviously, making poetry a job. There’s the money thing ‘cause everyone has an opinion about your budget and thinks you’re audacious for wanting to get paid to write. Generally speaking, also, most people think you’re sort of silly, especially if you’re a girl writing about yourself. Who wants to listen to a woman talk about herself! Why doesn’t she just get a job at a bank. Eileen Myles wrote a thing called Being Female for The Awl, where she says, “Is writing a job. Writing books, writing poems. If it is then the message to women is to go elsewhere.”
You should read it. This is your job.
