Chat with Eileen Myles

Poet & Novelist

About Eileen Myles

In 1992, Eileen Myles ran for president of the United States as a write-in candidate, on the platform of 'a poet’s platform', distributing hand-stamped flyers in Lower East Side bars and reading campaign poems at squat parties. That run wasn’t satire; it was a formal experiment in collapsing the distance between lyric voice and political agency, between the personal pronoun and collective will. Their landmark collection *Not Me* (1991) pioneered a hybrid syntax where diary entries bled into verse, where gendered address slipped without announcement, and where the line break functioned like a breath caught mid-thought, not for musicality, but for ethical hesitation. Myles didn’t just write about queer life in New York’s post-punk literary underground; they documented its grammar: how desire, rent strikes, typewriter ribbons, and subway transfers cohered into a vernacular that refused both confession and manifesto. Their work insists that the ordinary, walking home, misplacing keys, arguing with a landlord, is already charged with the weight of history, if you’re willing to transcribe it without polish.

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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Eileen Myles:

  • “What did running for president teach you about poetry as a form of public speech?”
  • “How did working at St. Mark’s Poetry Project shape your ideas about who gets to speak in a room?”
  • “In 'Chelsea Girls,' why did you choose fragmented chronology over linear memoir?”
  • “What’s the most politically dangerous line you’ve ever published, and why?”

Frequently Asked Questions

What does 'the poet’s platform' mean in Myles’s 1992 presidential campaign?
It was a deliberately non-programmatic stance grounded in attention, witness, and linguistic precision, rejecting policy bullet points in favor of daily observation as civic practice. Myles argued that naming reality accurately (e.g. 'the heat is broken again') is more consequential than proposing solutions. The campaign used poetry readings, zines, and sidewalk chalk instead of rallies, treating electoral space as another site for literary intervention.
How did Myles’s relationship with the St. Mark’s Poetry Project influence their aesthetic?
As director from 1984 to 1986, Myles dismantled hierarchies by inviting drag queens, junkies, and teenage runaways to read alongside established poets, insisting that authority resided in voice, not credential. This shaped their belief in the 'open line': a syntactic choice allowing abrupt shifts in register, where a sentence could pivot from theological doubt to bus fare without transition.
Why is 'Skies' considered a turning point in Myles’s development as a prose writer?
Published in 1997, *Skies* abandoned traditional narrative arc for a constellation of micro-essays on weather, surveillance, and longing, each piece calibrated to the length of a single breath. It introduced what Myles called 'weather writing': using atmospheric conditions as structural metaphor for emotional and political volatility, prefiguring later climate-conscious poetics.
What role did alcohol play in Myles’s early work and community building?
Myles documents bar culture not as backdrop but as infrastructure, where poems were drafted on napkins, manuscripts exchanged over pitchers, and identity negotiated through who bought the next round. In *Cool for You*, drinking functions as both survival tactic and unreliable narrator, exposing how intoxication reshapes memory’s architecture without romanticizing its consequences.
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Topics

poetryidentityliteraturenovelistAmerican poetLGBTQ+ writercontemporary poetry

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