Not Me

"I think Myles is probably my favourite living poet. I love ‘An American Poem’ because it turns the autofiction thing on its head. It uses an ‘I,’ and a very confessional sounding ‘I,’ but it’s a completely invented ‘I.’ It’s not Eileen Myles’s own background at all. What’s really funny about it is that afterwards people used to come up to Eileen and say, ‘I didn’t know you were a Kennedy. Are you really a Kennedy?!’ The cultural obsession we have with the ‘I’ and the purity of the ‘I’ makes us vulnerable to that kind of mistake. It’s the flipside of when you don’t use an ‘I’ and you use a made up name, but do use real material. In both cases, there’s some lurking sense that trickery is afoot and needs to be exposed. But I think that clunking, naïve reader is there in all of us. It’s like: ‘But you said it was ‘I’! You said it was ‘Kathy’? Which is it? Is this a true story or not??’ I find that kind of response, to which I’m absolutely not immune, endearing as well as frustrating. I guess we’d all like to be slightly more sophisticated readers than we’re quite capable of being, because we’re so curious about other people and we so much want to know what’s really going on in their lives. Yeah. And: is it ironic, and is it supposed to be funny? Why are you doing it? There’s a lot of anger around it. I’ve been interested to see that. I think that fear must be at the root of it. I thought, ‘Say whaaaat?’ That was so funny. It was at an event full of young women, and they were so earnest about it, and I was so earnest about it, saying, ‘Chris you’re our queen!’ And Chris responded, ‘Guys, it’s a joke. It’s a grotesque joke!’ It wasn’t just me. Everyone was like, ‘What?!’ That was great. But that really gave me the same feeling I’ve been describing, of, oh, I’ve been a bad reader here. I’ve got too invested in the truth of this story to see the ways in which this is a subversive story or this is a playful story, or this is poking fun at the character of Chris as much as it is the character of Dick. But that’s part of the same tendency, isn’t it? This desire to know the real story and to put your affection and attention and care into the right character. It is the naïve reader in us, which I think we all share, however sophisticated we might be capable of being. There’s another kind of reader in us, who very badly needs to know what’s real and what isn’t. But coming back to Eileen, and this particular poem. It’s a perfect little novel. It does genuinely set up a character and put them out into the world and tell a fiction. At the same time, it also sneaks in all kinds of political content. Actually, reading it today, I realised a lot of the same utopian ideas crop up again in the fabulous ‘Acceptance Speech,’ which is in Eileen’s new collection Evolution . (There’s a great video of Eileen reading it at the London Review Bookshop at an event we did together at around the time of Trump’s acceptance speech. I prefer the counterfactual reality in which Myles is president, I must say.) The Kennedy poem has got the same sort of political material —why are there homeless on the streets of Washington? But it’s also a Lydia Davis-style mini-novel, a one page novel. Yes. And it ends with a beautiful tribute to democracy: “We are all Kennedys.” There’s nobody who’s got so much swagger and who can so skilfully evade earnestness while still saying something real and heartfelt as Eileen. It staggers me how much they’re capable of doing that. They never sound earnest or over-sincere or too ickily heartfelt. And yet there’s always has this sort of whomp in the chest. Oh, wow. The new book Evolution is spectacular and contains ‘Acceptance Speech,’ which I think is just one of the best poems of the last few years. And then I’m mad about Afterglow , which is a memoir about Eileen’s dog dying. It goes off in multiple directions. It’s just this strange explosion of a book and I found it so bewitching."