Eileen Myles’ “Peanut Butter,” Jane Hirshfield’s “My Species,” and Robert Frost’s “Birches” each use plainspoken vocabulary and domestic imagery to branch outwards towards life’s most urgent questions; each poem locates itself in small, particular moments of bliss and wonder.
Pablo Neruda’s rivers and seas are far from skyscrapers and train lines. His verdant island isn’t much like Eileen Myles’s neon city, where rivers tend to be placid and not ones in which to dip the toes of your feet.
Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, performer and art journalist who ran a write-in candidacy for president twenty-five years ago when the bulk of our presidential candidates were straight, white, male, and wealthy. But you wouldn’t know any of this from their Instagram page, where their bio reads, simply, “poet.”
Twitter is maybe one of the most ideal places to watch a draft shape itself into a finished essay—a public place for us to learn the bones.
1 I have a few hours to kill in Las Vegas and I’m looking for a quiet place to finish Eileen Myles’s Inferno. Reading here feels like a radical act; it doesn’t make anybody any money or provide a sense of spectacle. The Vegas Strip seems to discourage it. I finally find a relatively quiet…
“Anthologists invariably make enemies,” Eunice De Souza notes in her introduction to Nine Indian Women Poets. This anthology is unlike most anthologies, as De Souza takes up her editorial role to rally against universality, mapmaking, and flattery. De Souza isn’t seeking to make enemies, but she realizes that all choices for anthologies suggest other choices:…
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