It’s been an incredibly hard week in many ways. I left work while the storm clouds gathered and fought off the desire to just go home and crawl into bed. This is a pretty rare feeling for me.
I had promised myself a trip to McNally Jackson (now one of my very regular haunts and probably where I’ll meet him) to attend a reading and Q&A session with Eileen Myles, a poet I have admired and loved for years. It’s really one of those New York City dreams-come-true to walk into a bookstore and attend something like this. I got there early and sat reading with my back towards the rest of the store, crying out the week with Jack Gilbert. I made my way downstairs to sit with the rest of the rapt audience, in a room with way too few chairs. In a good way. I felt better immediately.
I’ve always had this weird relationship with “poetry” and such, because I love it but I feel like people have this very pre-defined assumption about what poetry is, who reads it, and what kind of people write it. Maybe it seems silly now, but when I was younger I would correct people when they asked me if I was a “writer” or a “dancer” or a “poet” because I didn’t like to be categorically defined. “I’m a person who happens to write,” I would respond.
Eileen Myles is the sort of writer that forces you to recognize the breadth of what poetry can even mean. She was witty, intellectual, relaxed, and hilarious. She made a lot of jokes and also very relevant commentary about the New York Times review on her new collection, I Must Be Living Twice (“it’s very female treatment to have a major part of the review talk about what I look like”). If I’m allowed a joke, I kind of knew that this reading would make me realize that I’m definitely not feminist enough. I have a long way to go.
