Eileen Myles: When Dogs and Mothers Die
Photo: Peggy O'Brien. Television brought me Eileen Myles. I first saw the poet deliver a reading from I Must Be Living Twice at the University of Rochester’s Susan B. Anthony Institute during a public symposium on Jill Soloway’s Amazon series, “Transparent.” My daughter—silent until Myles took the podium—began babbling as babies do, clanging toys on the leg of a table we had nestled under. Heads turned. Eyes narrowed. Hot with shame, I collected our things, baby on my back, ready to duck out of the library and into the night.
Myles, who goes by the pronoun they, paused. “I don’t mind the baby,” they said. “We really need more babies at these things.” The reading resumed, Myles’s hand carving line breaks out of the air. Was it during “Along the Strand” or “I always put my pussy…” that my daughter stood up from my lap, taking her first steps across the floor and into the arms of a female rabbi sitting next to us? I’ll never know.
Lines are drawn to keep just about every non-cis-male out. Lines are drawn to keep children separate, too—because, after all, they are so much a part of women. Parents of the Western world, regardless of gender, feel that tension. But Myles shows us that the lines demarcating who we are aren’t as fixed as they seem.
Literary form is no exception. Myles’s latest, Afterglow (A Dog Memoir), warps the canon by embodying the mutability of memory and mind. At the crossroads of a book about the fading life of Myles’s beloved pit bull, Rosie, is a blueprint for dismantling conformity and exploring the sublime planes of our existence. With monologue, sci-fi reveries, cosmological lectures, and a chapter called “Dog House” that resonates like a Shepard tone, the book speaks to our shared animal vulnerability facing the fragile, uncertain essence of life in time. A dog lesson.
A recipient of countless accolades, including a Creative Capital nonfiction grant, Myles is the author of more than twenty books and has spent over forty years as a poet, novelist, performer, and art journalist. Having served as artistic director of the St. Marks Poetry Project and run for president as “openly female” in 1991-92, Myles’s life is a caravan of residencies, workshops, fellowships, and teaching
