“To decide to do “this” as a living is to invite barbs that generally pile up around gender and power. The poet is a fag, the poet is a drag, the poet is righteous. But really I think people resent our freedom. Our choice to keep doing something they may have done badly when they were younger and were full of feeling and to keep doing something that supposedly anyone can do – making something out of something as practical and mundane as language is to brand oneself as a lifelong fool rather than merely a fool in her youth. People feel sad about what they disavowed to become who they are now. Poets are human of course and have disavowed plenty, but to stand behind this nonetheless significant or foolish act – it’s a kind of self identifying, self categorizing act (like language itself) that enrages people exactly in the place where they’ve made choices and need to assume you haven’t.”
Eileen Myles on being a poet (source)
“She plummets through all her languages: journalese, scholarese, tough girl speak, so intent is this poet on getting it right.”
Eileen Myles on Tory Dent (1996)
“That initial response, the poet’s notes, are an independent work of art, an act of perception, the poet as camera, recording his or her own responses to an art object without going the next step and flattening the response into conventional prose. It’s actually a terrible sacrifice the art world demands of poets, the virgins thrown into the volcano, so that the shiny painting and sculpture of their time will have its equivalent in print, sort of. The poets will have backed off from the spikiness of their own perceptions for the glory of instantly appearing in print at all, and for the glamour of being associated with such state-of-the-art art as modern art and even the small sum we receive for writing the average short review.”
About Martha Diamond by Eileen Myles
