Get A Conversation with Eileen Myles All To Yourself

Carmen’s Team Pick:

I want to help you have a conversation with Eileen Myles. It starts on the Internet.

I follow the “Eileen Myles” tag on Tumblr, both because of my own life and because I like to queue posts for Fuck Yeah Eileen Myles in my spare time. I log in most days, and nights, and afternoons, and find pretty much nothing new there, except occasionally a “1+” pops up, like a strange gift from the Internet. On Friday this little “1+” was an unexpected and mysterious message from OR Books:

Send blank email to badmirror@orbooks.com and see what happens! (Don’t worry: it’s free.)

At first I was all, “why the fuck would I send a weird blank email to this address?” but then I was all “what bad has ever come from an email?” I have a great junk filter anyway. Also, I knew it had to do with Eileen Myles, so I decided to go for it.

I sent an email with the subject “this is blank inside, you can even check.”

Within seconds I received this automatic message:

Thank you for ordering a free copy of “Bad Mirror: A Conversation With Eileen Myles.” 

It was linked right there in the email, a neat PDF transcript for my eyes to gobble up and live inside of for a little bit. It is the full transcript of Eileen’s interview with John Oakes about Inferno, a book I know you have already read multiple times.

Everything Eileen Myles says is engaging, interesting, and profound. So take the plunge and send the email. Who knows what awaits your heart:

“the classic cliché is that men are creative because they can’t give birth, and it might just be too much that a woman, who has the capacity to give birth, would instead—or also—write, and create. Creation is really another unexplored aspect of being female, so it’s new ground and when people talk about coming of age, I think it’s key. I think about punk girls and ’zines: it’s all about this rudimentary, great, raw writing which is generally associated instead with the men…”

On Style, Eileen Myles

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.

Eileen Myles Believes In Evil But Not Witch Hunts

Rachel’s Team Pick

Sometimes Eileen Myles writes a thing and you can’t explain it or even talk about it very intelligently because she already used all the words that you would want to say. Sometimes I think Eileen Myles is the smartest person I (don’t) know. Sometimes Eileen Myles sounds like a total wingnut which is good because so do all of my favorite people.

All this is my way of telling you that Eileen has written a thing, it’s not poetry, it’s like an essay I guess and it’s called “School for Witch Burners.” It is about, in no particular order, 1) Harvard 2) Elizabeth Warren, a teacher at Harvard and one of the creators of the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau 3) the 2011 Anthony Hopkins film The Rite 5) the 2010 film The Social Network 6) witch hunts.

Maybe it won’t change your life, whatever, I didn’t even see The Social Network, but I guess I just felt really dumb upon reading this for not knowing it needed to be written, but also really glad it was. I don’t know what part to quote, so I’m just going to pick the part I liked the best:

I wanted to see The Rite because I miss my simple beliefs in exorcism. I believed in exorcism as a child and I also feared that I would tip unwittingly towards the side of Satan. Consuming The Rite the other night in my artist colony single bed I thought to myself quietly that perhaps I am Satan. I have lazily and simply made room for him and this is my life. Placidly evil. Eating peanuts, farting and drinking tea in bed… The Social Network is not frank about evil. It really doesn’t know. Do you? Is there evil in the world. Well just watch a government divided between those who want to heap more opportunity on the rich and openly sabotage the middle class, the “working people” (is any one? Working, I mean) in America and the poor—and the poor and the working people by and large do not know their true names. Most of them except for the most frankly indigent and drug dealers will proudly call themselves middle class—isn’t that in fact a big part of the problem. So bear in mind that in The Rite we learn that to destroy evil—and Satan, we must learn his name. The Catholics still have that down at least.

So if you were wondering on a Thursday afternoon if any smart women still have smart things to say about other smart women, if poets still have anything relevant to say, or just what Eileen Myles watches on Netflix, hey, this one’s for you.

Pure Poetry #2: Eileen Myles

Pure Poetry Week:

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen

I met Eileen Myles on Autostraddle, which was a good sign. My first thought at meeting her was that I had to leave this class I was in because oh my god I found this poet. Eileen knew everything, and her poetry felt genuine. I always feel when I read an Eileen Myles poem that I am getting to know her so much better.

My first Eileen Myles poem said this and was called “Smile”:

“Every
time he smiled he thought Eileen
is a fool. Or that’s what love looks
like.”

Somewhere between that day and today, the day you let me talk about Eileen Myles, I left class and bought a leather bomber jacket and bought Skies. I had also developed an ebay addiction. Skies is a collection of poems. It was really cheap on ebay. The day after it arrived, I packed a bag and left home. I packed Skies. I didn’t want to lose it so I carried it with me.

That night I ended up at a close friend who also writes for Autostraddle‘s house. At the end of the night it was my two friends and I and Eileen. I read Skies to them.

When I put Skies in my backpack I put away a photograph inside of someone I thought I was losing. I knew it would be safe there because I was going to keep Skies on my bedside table. It seemed cute, just her and I and Eileen.

Soon I had bought Sorry, Tree and The New Fuck You: An Adventure in Lesbian Reading which wasn’t written by Eileen, but she edited it and I knew she’d have good taste. And I took Cool for You out of the library… and renewed it. I saved up for Inferno.

Every time I read a new Eileen Myles book, I end up carrying it on me for weeks. I think I’m going to end up with a good collection. I would never lose it.

“in a few
days you’ll
be shaped
by this
& a new

meaning
will
come.”

Eileen Myles on Being Female

Sometimes a thing is so exactly something you would imagine into the world that it is hard at first to believe it is real and you wonder if you have instead fallen asleep on your lunch break again and are dreaming. Sometimes the Internet is a perfect machine. Anyways, Eileen Myles has a lot to say. You should probably listen.

When I saw the recent Vida pie charts that showed how low the numbers are of female writers getting reviewed in the mainstream press I just wasn’t surprised at all though I did cringe. When you see your oldest fears reflected back at you in the hard bright light of day it doesn’t feel good. Because a woman is someone who grew up observing that a whole lot more was being imagined by everyone for her brother and the boys around her in school. If she’s a talented artist she’s told that she could probably teach art to children when she grows up and then she hears the boy who’s good in art get told by the same teacher that one day he could grow up to be a commercial artist. The adult doing the talking in these kinds of exchanges is most often female. And the woman who is still a child begins to wonder if her childhood is already gone because she has been already replaced in the future by a woman who will be teaching children like herself. And will she tell them that they too will not so much fail but vanish before their lives can even begin.

Autostraddle Read A F*cking Book Club #1: Eileen Myles’ Inferno

All night I struggled and tugged for the perfect word. In the brown of the dark, my sister’s soft breathing in her Hollywood bed across the way. The hum of the house, the oil heater that might blow up. Groaning, stopping, going strong. Devil shaking the bottom of my bed when I closed my eyes. (p 75)

I didn’t know what “a poet’s novel” meant when I started reading this book. I think I thought it just meant “a novel written by a poet” or “a novel with poetic tendencies.” That is not what this is, I don’t think. I think what Myles meant when she called this a “poet’s novel” is that it is a novel built the way that a poet builds a poem. It’s one structure inhabited by another. I get that now. I think I get poetry in a way I didn’t before, or at least Eileen Myles’ poetry. Eileen Myles. Goddamn.

As I should maybe have intimated from the subtitle, the technical aspects of this novel are really important; a lot of the writing in it is in fact about writing, which had me thinking about the writing in the novel itself really intensively in a self-referential and kind of exhaustingly “meta” way. The book opens in an English class, dissecting literature, and I feel like the whole way through you can feel Myles performing that same kind of dissection; her presence is still tangible in each line, you can feel how she’s pruned and perfected each sentence in the way that poets do. When you think about it that way – as almost an epic poem instead of a novel – it makes the whole thing seem just sort of staggering and crazy, intimidating but amazing.

I think what was also really intimidating was her total lack of self-pity. It felt like she really was writing about a character in a novel sometimes, like she was just sort of mildly fascinated with the trials of this hungry, brilliant young woman selling lead slugs for beer money. As Emily Gould says in this show, “Eileen Myles for President,” by the Poetry Foundation that I’m now obsessed with, “…as she’s refusing to group herself with the people who’s memoirs are “Look how badly I’ve been victimized,” she’s saying, “well, you know, I have of course been victimized, but that’s not the point.” As she puts it, there’s no self-pity in Eileen Myles, but she does want you to know.

It felt like such an extraordinary act of self-control or of complete dissociation to be able to just put this here, to put all these things that happened on pages in ink and then leave them without trying to fix them or explain them or defend them or heal them. Everything she went through, everything anyone did to her is just here. Every feeling she had of incredible confidence that another woman might feel verged on cockiness — that’s there too. She is unapologetic. How do you do that, how do you give us these things without giving us your heart and soul along with them. It amazes and terrifies me.

My corrupt womanhood: a waste. I feel the same way about being a writer. Staying up all night burning my brain cells, for years, swallowing tons of cheap speed, also for years, eating poorly, pretty much drinking myself to death. And then not. Contracting whatever STD came to me in the seventies, eighties, nineties, smoking cigarettes, a couple a packs a day for at least twenty years, being poor and not ever really going to the doctor (only the dentist: flash teeth), wasting my time doing so little work, being truly dysfunctional, and on top of that, especially my point, being a dyke, in terms of the whole giant society, just a fogged human glass turned on its side. Yak yak yak a lesbian talking. And being rewarded for it.

Somehow her lack of sympathy for herself made it worse, made me feel for her even more. I was conscious of feeling really sad that she had been young in that time and that place, when it was so hard to be a woman and be an artist and be gay and be all those things. Like how awful must it be to have to feel like being gay is like diving into cold water, like you have to put it off for as long as possible and then brace yourself and grit your teeth and say “well, I guess I have no choice” and let yourself drop like a brick. Good thing that’s over with – and then I was like, oh wait. I see what you did there. I felt even sadder about that.

Did you notice how it felt less and less like a novel as it went on? Like I felt less like there was a character called Eileen/Leena/Ei and more like Myles was addressing me directly. Fourth wall or something. I felt like as the book progressed it became less preoccupied with a character or story and more preoccupied with stories in general, or with art, I guess. She gets so vocal about supporting art and artists, about how hard it is to find someone to give you money for your work.

Aside from being confused and blindsided by this shift in genre that made me feel like I was maybe crazy, I was also just kind of bewildered by this concept on a basic level. I think I grew up with the belief that being an artist means you deserve to be underpaid and underfed and overworked and underappreciated. I was so impressed but also weirded out by her balls-out assertion that she deserves to be paid for her work like anyone else, that she deserves to make a living off what she lives for. She writes in “An American Poem” that “My art can’t be supported until it is gigantic/until it is bigger than everyone else’s.” I don’t know what that means. This is what I wrote in my journal:

she gets into this space where art is important, where art is worthwhile, maybe the only worthwhile thing. i both dislike and admire that; the ability to get into your work, whatever that work is, so much so that you feel like you can demand attention for it. and compensation. i am astonished always when anyone feels like they deserve anything, because i so rarely do… it was nice because for a minute it took away the sense of why do we do this even; i was able to stop thinking about the overarching anxiety that is the self-indulgence of making art. it just seemed like a thing. like building a house. or making a dress. you just make this thing to put in people’s hands. even if it’s only your own hands. and i hadn’t realized what a relief it was to have that question taken away. how much easier it makes it to concentrate on other things, like how you can make this the best thing it can be.

That was probably oversharing. This is what Riese wrote in her journal:

Reading Inferno has been good for me. Like the opposite of being yelled at for not taking a $10/hour office job ‘just to do it’, like I hated that moment. I would rather be hungry and owe visa than do a thing besides the point. nobody has to understand it, but they do because if they don’t understand it, they won’t support it. art is the most important thing, but people don’t think they should pay for it. instead they pay for things they hate. accountants and orthodontists. people will pay for art, you just have to ask them. like not feeling guilty to run on donations sometimes but I do. This is what makes the unemployment/constant hustle bearable to artists — they value the experience of striving, they almost need it. this is our job. it is our job to work weird jobs and to beg. Why do I feel guilty for wanting to write instead of file. I file too.

In any case, I was really impressed by this book, in the same way that one might be “impressed” by a moving car if they step into a crosswalk without looking both ways first. It made me think really differently and write really differently while I was reading it, which is pretty much my measure of whether a book is good or important or well done. I don’t know that I really “got it,” or at least all of it, but I don’t mean that in a way that means the book is pretentious or intentionally obscure or impenetrable. Just that some things take a long time to tease open and work out, and that doesn’t mean anything bad. On the contrary, I feel like it is often good for books to be hard, to stretch muscles and leave you kind of sore but happy afterwards. That is kind of how I felt after reading Inferno. Tired and sore, but happy.

Here is what some other people have to say about this book.

+ Gloria Woodman at Terror People: “It’s a nice book to have. The cover is swirled with static flames and the type and layout make it easy to read. Even drunk in this Laundromat. There is something powerful about Eileen Myles’ writing, evenInferno (A Poet’s Novel), this almost trite re-telling of her other work. It doesn’t matter what she is saying, I want to listen. I want to hear her stories over-and-over again. She writes about seeing a picture of Amelia Earhart, “I couldn’t tell if I had a crush on her, or was her, or if I was just crazy.”

+ Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore at Bookslut: “Inside Myles’s castle, everything is pared down even when it’s rambling and raw and rough and broken and shy and bold and open: “We were so excited because the silence of our childhood was over…” Inferno shows us the adventure of poetry, but also reveals the places where a poet starts to philosophize absently: do we really need to know that the “quality of people’s togetherness” is called a bhav in Bhakti yoga? Instead let’s stay in that space where the page becomes your head, expanding.”

+ Herocious at The Open End: “Reading INFERNO was bodily, it jerked my mouth around and made me jot down words in the margins. This way, they could snug close to Eileen’s prose.Fanning through the pages with my thumb – after reading it – I couldn’t help but stare at my scratchy notes and silently understand how much the INFERNO experience stimulated me, a high point in my life as a reader. The idea of replicating that experience in a strained and articulate review made me ball up in the corner and scream.”

+ Liz Brown at Bookforum: “With Inferno, Myles has written, among other things, a field guide to poetry readings—the “trembling voices,” the crowd “laughing familiarly”—as well as a meditation on hatching a writing life. She offers theorems about relationships with the famous, the artist’s responsibility “to get collected,” and how rich people need poor friends. In charting her downtown travels, she has mapped a bygone New York: Club 57, the Pyramid, and the Duchess, the dyke bar where she drunkenly attempts to do the splits. The book, in other words, is packed.”

What about you? Tell me how you feel. Use examples from the text. I wanna know.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS!

1. Is this a novel? Or an autobiography? Or a memoir? Does it matter?

2. Was it weird how honest she was about real people/events? Good? Bad?

3. Can we talk about what I am calling “the vagina chapter.” You know the part I’m talking about. I wanted to talk about it here but I didn’t know how. I trust that you will.

4. Did you, like, know about Eileen Myles before this? If so, has anything changed in your feelings about/for her? If not, what are your thoughts?

5. Did you feel a little bit insane after reading this book? I did, it’s ok.

Rumi had someone following him around all day long, while he spoke the poem. He was simply in it. I was in it too. The room was the poem, the day I was in. Oh Christ. What writes my poem is a second ring, inner or outer. Poetry is just the performance of it. These little things, whether I write them or not. That’s the score. The thing of great value is you. Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live.

Autostraddle Book Club Reads Inferno: It’s All Happening on November 19th

“Dante really had no other way to talk about his time except in a poem. Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) is a heavily coded poem. It’s not about censorship but something else. It was an age of not even satire but allegory. His beliefs were fixed in the structure of his poem like the windows of a church. Her eyes twinkled. Oh my god.”
-Inferno

+
Hi hi hi what are you doing right now? Are you refreshing tumblr or making grilled cheese or wondering whether your cat is gay? Maybe instead of that you should buy a copy of Inferno, because we’re reading it for Autostraddle Read A F*cking Book Club. Yeah. Yeah, I know.
+

Eileen Myles’ Inferno is a “poet’s novel,” a concept which we were heretofore largely unfamiliar with but are nonetheless very excited about. Also, we are excited about Eileen Myles. A lot. Forever. So excited that we are reading her book for Book Club even though OR Books, the beautiful angel publishing house of the future that she’s with, does not distribute via Amazon, thus denying us literally hundreds of cents in affiliate linkage money.

We have more coming for you soon w/r/t exactly how special and beautiful Inferno is, because we are unabashedly obsessed with this book. Until then, we would like to politely suggest you buy it, and then read it. By November 19th, which is when we will have the open thread discussing our feelings on it.

+
A word about money, honey. We know you don’t have any because neither do we. If $16 for a book is too much for you, just go with the ebook that only costs $10! That is the price of two soy lattes, assuming that you put the change from each transaction in the tip jar, which you always should. LOOK YOU CAN EVEN CHOOSE FROM TWO DIFFERENT COVERS.

[ BUY THIS BOOK ]

For our international friends: the publisher assures us that international shipping is only $5 to the UK and $8 everywhere else, which depending on your exchange rate may or may not be a reasonable amount of money. If not, did you notice up above where I said EBOOKS. It’s a thing. If you’re reading this, you have a computer with internet access, and if you have that then you’re only a few clicks away from being up close and personal with an ebook. Ok? Ok.

The thing is that even at our most poorest moments, supporting literature and writers is literally, after food (sometimes) THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO WITH YOUR MONEY. We are ALL ABOUT THE LIBRARY, and prefer it, but sometimes events occur which require us to buy books, like school and presents, and this is just gonna have to be one of those times and we think it’s okay. We’re at peace with it. We are ready to splurge to support independent, feminist lesbian literature. Of all things.

We have more to say on this topic. You will also have more to say on this topic. Eileen Myles has many things to say. Some of them are perfect and beautiful things, like: “She just kind of befriended us like wolves but she believed that wolves were good and could be taught too,” and “There was something really covered about childhood. I think it was the nuns.” I don’t know. We feel good about this. Do you not feel good yet? Here is audio of Emily Gould talking about Eileen Myles and then Eileen reading a poem, we found it just for you, it’s really fantastic we’re not kidding. Now how do you feel? WE ARE EXCITED TO FIND OUT. See you in November, you badass motherfuckers.

Read a F*cking Book: Fall 2010 Preview or “The Rise of the Novel”

Usually when we write seasonal preview posts, which we feel obligated to do by a force larger than ourselves, we must exert actual effort to uncover those items suitable for anticipation and then feign effortless knowledge of said items.

But you guys, for real, I am genuinely, sincerely, completely stoked about some books coming out this fall! I did not even need to look this shit UP I AM ON IT. It almost makes me wish I was still in college buying books for English 360: The Rise of the Novel. JK I hated that class. Anyhow!

Jonathan Franzen‘s Freedom comes out today and it’s already being called the greatest novel of the year etc. Well, the thing is that BOTTOM LINE Jonathan Franzen is a really excellent writer. His last novel, The Corrections, was undoubtedly a masterpiece. It started out a bit slow but then unfurled with careful, complicated, compelling energy and BONUS! two queer leads! I read The Corrections in 2002, the winter I decided to leave my boyfriend and the condo/life/dog we shared. The boyfriend was visiting family in Las Vegas and I felt like I could breathe/read for the first time in eons. I thought, he’d never read this book or ANY BOOK, even if I begged him to. So that was that, we broke up the day he got home.

I read and enjoyed Franzen’s essay collection How to Be Alone a few years ago. In his oft-cited Harper’s piece “Why Bother” about the “decline of the American Novel” and depressive realism vs. tragic realism, Franzen confers with Novel Expert Shirley Brice Heath, who calls Franzen “a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world.” Later on, he says this (it’s a good reason for why you should get his novel, or any novel):

Whether they think about it or not, novelists are preserving a tradition of precise, expressive language; a habit of looking past surfaces into interiors; maybe an understanding of private experience and public context as distinct but interpenetrating; maybe mystery, maybe manners. Above all, they are preserving a community of readers and writers and the way in which members of this community recognize each other is that nothing in the world seems simple to them.

Freedom obviously garnered a super-rave review in The New York Times Sunday Book Review and also controversy —  apparently Jodi Piccoult and Jennifer Weiner are displeased by the excessive hulabaloo over another “white male literary darling.” Furthermore, Franzen is the first novelist to grace on the cover of TIME magazine in ten years and the only “serious” novelist besides Toni Morrison to do so. But reader: I only feature prominently and direct you towards straight white male literary darlings when they’re really fucking good.

The TIME article contained this quote from Freedom, which I think you’ll like:

“Patty had all day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable.”

Eileen Myles, a poet who I mentioned in our Top Ten Lesbian & Bisexual Poets to Fall in Love With, is realeasing a “poet’s novel” titled Inferno in September. You can only get it through the OR Books website, a “new type of publishing company” which  “embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the way we do business.”

Here’s the description of Inferno:

From its beginning—“My English professor’s ass was so beautiful.”—to its end—“You can actually learn to have grace. And that’s heaven.”—poet, essayist and performer Eileen Myles’ chronicle transmits an energy and vividness that will not soon leave its readers. Her story of a young female writer, discovering both her sexuality and her own creative drive in the meditative and raucous environment that was New York City in its punk and indie heyday, is engrossing, poignant, and funny. This is a voice from the underground that redefines the meaning of the word.

Speaking of gay people with nice resumes, Kate Bornstein‘s anticipated follow-up to Gender Outlaw also comes out in September:

Today’s transpeople, genderqueers, and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being. Gender Outlaws, edited by the original gender outlaw, Bornstein, together with writer, raconteur, and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, collects and contextualizes the work of this generation’s trans and genderqueer forward thinkers—new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world’s most respected news sources. Gender Outlaws includes essays, commentary, comic art, and conversation from a diverse group of trans-spectrum people who live and believe in barrier-breaking lives.

Laneia is going to review Tao Lin‘s Richard Yates for you this week, which comes out on September 7th and which I will also read and, I think, enjoy. Speaking of writers who a lot of internet-people have irrationally abrasive feelings towards, I might even get into the reviewing spirit and finally tell you why you should go get Emily Gould‘s And the Heart Says Whatever. Emily totally doesn’t believe I’m ever going to review her book anymore, but I am, I swear. I cannot let these six google docs and 50,000 words I’ve written about the book (but mostly about myself) just languish in cyber-landfills forever.

I’m getting the feeling that David Sedaris has run out of good anecdotes, but apparently not. His illustrated book of “animal-themed tales,” Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, comes out September 28th.

Also from the Sedaris clan this fall is Amy Sedaris‘s Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People. I love Amy Sedaris, she is one of my favorite people in the whole world.

Lorrie Moore, one of my top five favorite authors of all time, released her novel A Gate at the Stairs last year which I’m just now reading — and maybe you should too, because A Gate at the Stairs is now out in paperback. But, if you’re new to Lorrie Moore, begin with short story collection Birds of America.

Also look out for the 25th Anniversary Edition of William Burroughs’ Queer, Danielle Evans‘ debut short story book mostly about teenagers with “disorder,” Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self AND AND AND! Have you read an autobiography of Roald Dahl yet? It’s something you should do with your life. Luckily, Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl of RD comes out-mid September!

AND ONE LAST THING! I think you might like Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women by Rebecca Traister, who is one of those women with real jobs. I recognize her name, as I do most of the women who have real jobs writing on the internet, because one time she wrote about Emily Gould.

Here’s why I think you’ll like it though:

Read a F*cking Book: Ten Lesbian & Bisexual Poets To Fall in Love With

Hi nerds!  We were thinking today, about your needs, and we decided that some of you could probably use a little poetry in your lives.  We’ve mashed our brains together and made a list (which could never ever be complete enough!) of ten amazing queer ladysexy poets that you should check out right now, if you haven’t already.

1. Adrienne Rich

(b. 1929)

Adrienne Rich is more or less super- famous. She’s a major feminist and queer theorist (“Compulsory Heterosexuality” anyone?) who’s written heaps of non-fiction and poetry books. W.S Merwin said this about Adrienne Rich: “All her life she has been in love with the hope of telling utter truth, and her command of language from the first has been startlingly powerful.”

From “Transcendental Etude”:

There come times — perhaps this is one of them —
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die
when we have to pull back from the incantations,
rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,
and disenthrall ourselves, bestow
ourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansed
of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static
crowding the wires.

Get Adrienne Rich’s books, like
The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977

2. Eileen Myles

(b.1949)

I discovered Eileen Myles when she wrote an essay in The Believer about notebooks. I thought why did I not know about Eileen Myles before today. I asked my friend who knows everything about poetry and she didn’t understand why I didn’t know about Eileen Myles either. I don’t want this to happen to you.

Eileen Myles is “the rock star of modern poetry” (BUST Magazine) and “a cult figure to a generation of post-punk female writer-perfomers” (The New York Times) and we think that means that she’s super-honest and unafraid to get ugly or dirty or otherwise f*cked up. An East Village fixture with a working-class Boston background, she’s worked as Artistic Diretor of the St.Mark’s Poetry project, toured with Sister Spit and performed all around the world including at the Poetry Project, P.S. 122 and the WOW Café. Also she’s published like 15 books and has a “poet’s novel,” INFERNO, coming out this fall. Her memoir Chelsea Girls is one of Emily Gould’s favorites.

Some bits and pieces:

From “For Jordana”:
I think writing
is desire
not a form
of it

From “Dear Andrea”:
I love you too
don’t fuck up my hair
I can’t believe
you almost fisted me
today.
That was great.

From “Him and Others”:
Thoughts. Silly. I’d rather
sink my teeth in your neck,
seriously, knock you down
on the floor — all for love.
You’ll forget my lousy
poems but if I could just
mar you or something. Nothing
nice ever sticks but boy
a scar — If I could ever
really bruise you with
my feelings, them, so infinitely
forgettable & gone.

Get Eileen Myles: Sorry, Tree or Not Me (Native Agents).

Video Promo for INFERNO

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3. Audre Lorde

(1934 – 1992)

In addition to being a poet, Audre Lorde is a mega-important feminist and activist who was at the forefront of a new group of politically active women of all colors challenging the white middle-class hegemony and subsequent ethnocentric goals of 1960s feminism. Lorde pioneered the concept that racism, sexism and homophobia were linked in that they stemmed from people’s inability to recognize or tolerate difference.

“I am a black feminist lesbian poet,” Lorde said of her work, “and I identify myself as such because if there is one other black feminist lesbian poet in isolation somewhere within the reach of my voice, I want her to know she is not alone.”

On the topic of art as protest:

“… the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry, and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.”

From “Who Said It Was Simple”:

But I who am bound by my mirror
as well as my bed
see causes in color
as well as sex

and sit here wondering
which me will survive
all these liberations.

Get yourself some Audre Lorde books now.

4. Kirya Traber

I met Kirya Traber when she toured with Sister Spit in 2009. Aside from being a killer slam poet with years of festivals under her belt, she’s also working as the Residency Program Manager for YouthSpeaks.  Her poems deal with feminism, hair, race and Nina Simone, among other things.

From “Roll Call”:

thick and road worn,
dirt stained, jacked up 4 wheeler
truck behind us
one hand
on my mother’s shoulder

“You better watch your little black bitch”

I could smell his breath
tobacco plaque tangy
from across the front seat
and even then, I didn’t know
he was talking about me

Follow Kirya Traber on twitter

5. Alix Olson

(b. 1975)

Alix Olson is a spoken word poet / “red-hot, fire-bellied, feminismo-spewin’ volcano.” She tours the world, has been featured in practically every relevant magazine or newspaper and has put out a couple of albums – Built Like That and Independence Meal – that you should buy and eat with your ears. She interviewed Rachel Maddow for Velvet Park magazine, which is really neither here nor there, but I thought you might like to read it.

Random Book edited by Alix Olson: Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution

6. June Jordan

(1936- 2002)

Harlem born bisexual June Jordan was a Carribbean-American poet, novelist, journalist, biographer, dramatist, teacher and activist with lots of important super-passionate felings about the construction of race, gender, sexuality, politics, war, violence and human rights. She’s one of the most prolific African-American writers of all time with 28 books of varying genres like essays, memoirs, novels, poetry and children’s books. You know how Barack Obama was always saying “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”? He got it from June Jordan. Or from Alice Walker who got it from June Jordan. You know.

HAY HOLLER BISXEXUALS, she’s got some words about y’all: “If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable. To my mind, that is the keenly positive, politicizing significance of bisexual affirmation… to insist upon the equal validity of all the components of social/sexual complexity.”

Read this interview with June Jordan at BOMB Magazine about “I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky,” an experimental contemporary opera made in collaboration with composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars, that tells the stories of “men and women in Los Angeles struggling to find and articulate love in the midst of moral and physical devastation, tragedy, and upheaval . . . Like all of her work, the opera strives to bear witness to the human ability to survive nightmares of injustice and embrace visions of a more hopeful future.”

“One Minus One Minus One”

This is a first map of territory
I will have to explore as poems,
again and again

My mother murdering me
to have a life of her own

What would I say
(if I could speak about it?)

My father raising me
to be a life that he
owns

What can I say
(in this loneliness)

7. Staceyann Chin

(b.1971)

Staceyann Chin grew up in the part of Jamaica where buses full of white tourists don’t go. Her memoir, The Other Side of Paradise, deals with her mother’s rejection of Chin and her brother, and her subsequent struggle to grow up in the face of poverty and a splintered family.

From Publisher’s Weekly:
“[Chin’s mother] quickly foisted them onto other relatives for good, leaving Chin, at age nine, to fend for herself in the shack of her harsh great-aunt whose boys routinely attempted to rape her.”

Chin moved to New York several years ago and is an out lesbian political activist poet womanchild. She writes things like this, which I think you will like:

Faggot Haiku
Faggots reach into
their own asses we are not
afraid of our shit

8. Andrea Gibson

Andrea Gibson is another spoken word American poet and activist. Her latest album, Yellowbird, features a version of one of her most ridiculously moving pieces, “Ashes,” with music from Chris Pureka. Here just watch this:

Buy Pole Dancing To Gospel Hymns

9. Marilyn Hacker

(b. 1942)

Jan Heller Levi, who sounds pretty important, said this about Marilyn Hacker which is better than what I might say: “I think of her magnificent virtuosity in the face of all the strictures to be silent, to name her fears and her desires, and in the process, to name ours. Let’s face it, no one writes about lust and lunch like Marilyn Hacker. No one can jump around in two, sometimes even three, languages and come up with poems that speak for those of us who sometimes barely think we can even communicate in one.”

“Untitled”:

You did say, need me less and I’ll want you more.
I’m still shellshocked at needing anyone,
used to being used to it on my own.
It won’t be me out on the tiles till four-
thirty, while you’re in bed, willing the door
open with your need. You wanted her then,
more. Because you need to, I woke alone
in what’s not yet our room, strewn, though, with your
guitar, shoes, notebook, socks, trousers enjambed
with mine. Half the world was sleeping it off
in every other bed under my roof.
I wish I had a roof over my bed
to pull down on my head when I feel damned
by wanting you so much it looks like need.

10. Mary Oliver

(b. 1935)

Mary Oliver spent a few of her teenage years living in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s old house, helping Millay’s family sort through her old papers, so you know she’s gangsta. Since the early 1960s, Oliver has published heaps of poetry and prose, including American Primitive, which won the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1984.  Her work is heavily informed by her reflections on her natural surroundings, conjuring up images of her native Ohio and New England; the Harvard Review described her work as an “excellent antidote for the excesses of civilization.”

From “Wild Geese”:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

Buy Mary Oliver’s books