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Eileen Myles' poetry has perfect pitch for plain talk. "Oh, oh what/ pain I need/ whiskey sex/ and I get / it," she writes as a closer to her 1991 poem "Hot Night." At four pages, it's about as close as she gets to an epic poem.
Up to now, Myles has been a cult figure, a groundbreaking lesbian poet who took the Lower East Side of Manhattan by storm in the late 1970s and early '80s. She was published mostly by tiny avant-garde presses and read to coffee-shop audiences. Her cottage fame was a sign of artistic integrity.
But you can't live in the East Village in 1978 forever.
I Must Be Living Twice (Ecco, 368 pages, $29.99), her new career-spanning, major-imprint collection, will indeed be a second life for her poems—it is likely to introduce Myles' poetry to a much broader audience. She writes with whiskey-shooting casual swagger, but her poetry can be surprisingly oblique. In a confessional mode, she writes that she's not confessional: "More than anything/ I want privacy."
The style has attracted countless amateur imitators, despite being damn near impossible to successfully rip off. Her best poems have an immediacy that stays with you: "Come here/ and share the rain/ with me. You." she writes in "And Then the Weather Arrives."
Her short lines fragment the text so heavily it can sometimes be difficult to follow. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though, because once you surrender the need to follow the rhetoric of the poem, you can become absorbed in what may be Myles' greatest gift: her ability to make the reader meditate on the simplest bits of language.
Where Myles' poems usually find their limits is when they lapse into the ephemeral, when they become divorced from the concrete sidewalks of Canal Street, the weighty blankets of her lover's bed, or the cold metal deck of the ferry that steers her around the Statue of Liberty. Myles is a poet who needs a subject to write about.
If the new poems in this book are any sign of what's to come, it's possible Myles' best work is behind her. But the book argues strongly for Myles as a major poet. Where once there were some 13 books, all brilliant but none really demonstrating the true depth of her skill, now there is a collection that shows who she really is: a poet of incredible talent and enormous influence.
GO: Eileen Myles reads at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323, on Sunday, Oct. 18. 4 pm. Free.
Willamette Week