Pathetic Literature

By Eileen Myles

An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic” 

“Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature, a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called “pathetic” or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone.

Myles first reclaimed the word for a seminar they taught at the University of California San Diego in the early 2000s, rescuing it from the derision into which it had slipped and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or feeling, from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method pathos. Their identification of “pathetic” as ripe for reinvention forms the need for this anthology, which includes a hearty 106 contributors, encompassing canonical global stars like Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, Rumi, and Gwendolyn Brooks, literary libertines like Dodie Bellamy, Samuel R. Delany, and Bob Flanagan, as well as extraordinary writers on the rise, including Nicole Wallace, Precious Okoyomon, and Will Farris. Wrenching and discomfiting prose by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jack Halberstam, and Porochista Khakpour rubs shoulders with poems by Natalie Diaz, Victoria Chang, Lucille Clifton, and Ariana Reines, and butts up against fiction from Chester Himes, Djuna Barnes, Chris Kraus, and Qiu Miaojin, among so many others, including Myles’s own opening salvo of their 1992 presidential campaign. The result is a completely anomalous and uplifting anthology that encourages a fresh political discourse on literature, as well as supplying an essential compendium of pained, awkward, queer, trans, gleeful, and ever-jarring ways to think differently and live pathetically on a polarized and fearful planet.  

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780802157171

Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles (they/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in fall 2022. a “Working Life,” their newest collection of poems, is out now. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.

Book preview

Also by Eileen Myles

For Now

Evolution

Afterglow (a dog memoir)

I Must Be Living Twice / New and Selected Poems, 1975–2014

Snowflake / different streets

Inferno (a poet’s novel)

The Importance of Being Iceland / travel essays in art

Sorry, Tree

Tow (with drawings by artist Larry R. Collins)

Skies

on my way

Cool for You

School of Fish

Maxfield Parrish / Early & New Poems

The New Fuck You / Adventures in Lesbian Reading (with Liz Kotz)

Chelsea Girls

Not Me

1969

Bread and Water

Sappho’s Boat

A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains

Polar Ode (with Anne Waldman)

The Irony of the Leash

PATHETIC LITERATURE

AN ANTHOLOGY

EDITED BY

EILEEN MYLES

Grove Press

New York

Introduction and After Words Copyright © 2022 by Eileen Myles

All other copyright information listed in the credits on page 639

Jacket artwork: Nicole Eisenman, Tail End, 2021. © Nicole Eisenman.

Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Thomas Barratt

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [e-mail].

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: November 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title. 

ISBN 978-0-8021-5715-7

eISBN 978-0-8021-5717-1

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

for East River Park

and everyone who played

there, who lived and landed and

leapt through the branches

of its trees, its trees

and the activists

who sat there too

on the coldest

morning ever

Contents

Introduction by Eileen Myles

"untitled" by Alice Notley

"we’re the only colored people here" by Gwendolyn Brooks

"People Without Names" by The Friend

"Loveland" by Kevin Killian

"Yesterday I Was" by Ama Birch

"Afterword: The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle"by Andrea Dworkin

"Truth or Consequences" by Ariana Reines

Excerpt from The Pain Journal by Bob Flanagan

"A Description of the Camp" by Baha’ Ebdeir

"Would You Wear My Eyes?" by Bob Kaufman

"August 6, 2011" by Brandon Shimoda

Excerpt from The Romanian: Story of an Obsession by Bruce Benderson

"My Faggot Kansas Blood Confessions to the Earth and My Faggot Blood on His Fist" by CAConrad

"Reading My Catastrophe" by Camille Roy

"Soap Bubbles in the Dirty Water" by Can Xue

Excerpt from Texas: The Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa

Excerpt from My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman

"Before You Go" by Charles Bernstein

Excerpt from If He Hollers, Let Him Go by Chester Himes

Excerpt from I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

Excerpt from "Some Other Deaths of Bas Jan Ader" by Dana Ward

"Being Close to Data" by Dara Barrois/Dixon

Excerpt from God Jr. by Dennis Cooper

Excerpt from "Fat Chance" by Dodie Bellamy

Excerpts from Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

"Campaign Letter for President of the United States, 1991" by Eileen Myles

"that flaming brand and Boulder/Meteor" by essa may ranapiri

Excerpts from Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan

"A Child in Old Age and A Vision" by Fanny Howe

"there is religious tattooing" by Fred Moten

"Play It Again, S" by Gail Scott

Excerpt from Letter to His Father by Franz Kafka

Excerpt from Lenz by Georg Büchner

Excerpt from My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley

"My Struggle" by Jack Halberstam

"This Dark Apartment" by James Schuyler

"Chronicle" by Frank B. Wilderson III

Excerpt from Winter in the Blood by James Welch

"28." by Jerome Sala

"An Obituary" by Joe Proulx

"Stop" by Joan Larkin

"The Merry Widow and The Rubber Husband (or How I Caught HIV: Version 4; Fall 1983)" by Joe Westmoreland

"The Copyists" by Jocelyn Saidenberg

"Catullus Tells Me Not to Write the Rant Against the Poem ‘Good Bones’ by Maggie Smith" by The Cyborg Jillian Weise

Selections from The Hotel Wentley Poems by John Wieners

"The Cult of the Phoenix" by Jorge Luis Borges

"A Woman Is Talking to Death" by Judy Grahn

"You Better Come" by Justin Torres

"New Haven" by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

"SMALL / MEDIUM / LUST" by Andrea Abi-Karam

Excerpt from Great Expectations by Kathy Acker

"38" by Layli Long Soldier

Excerpt from Light While There Is Light by Keith Waldrop

"Shadow Janitor" by Kim Hyesoon

Excerpt from Children in Reindeer Woods by Kristín Ómarsdóttir

"In Case I Don’t Notice, God Gives You What You Can Handle, and The Only Good" by Laura Henriksen

Excerpt from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

Excerpt from Wigger by Lawrence Braithwaite

"Worms Make Heaven" by Laurie Weeks

"the mother’s story and slave cabin, sotterly plantation, maryland, 1989" by Lucille Clifton

Excerpt from No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman

Excerpt from All the Battles by Maan Abu Taleb

Selections from Bluets by Maggie Nelson

"East River Park Oak Tree" by Marcella Durand

Excerpt from "Potatoes or Rice?" by Matthew Stadler

"For the Death of 100 Whales, Flower Garland Froth, and Fleshy Nave" by Michael McClure

"Polishness" by Michelle Tea

"haiku, untitled 8, 5 years old, and untitled 2"by Mira Gonzalez

"Sum, People Like Monsters, How to, and Great" by Morgan Võ

"Wedding Loop" by Moyra Davey

"My Brother, My Wound" by Natalie Diaz

Excerpts from Goner by Nate Lippens

"it doesn’t matter how you fall into light, she said and think of the words as angels singing in your vagina, she said" by Akilah Oliver

"Los Angeles" by Porochista Khakpour

"NIIZH" by Nicole Wallace

"Letter Three" by Qiu Miaojin

"Intercepts" by Rae Armantrout

"The Gift of Sight" by Rebecca Brown

Selection from The Activist by Renee Gladman

"April 4 Friday by Rose Rosebud" Feliu-Pettet

"Kleist in Thun" by Robert Walser

"Ed and the Movies" by Robert Glück

"Four times over, I see you and I am getting closer, and Strain" by Sallie Fullerton

"Yesterday I went to him full of dismay" by Rumi

"Manual for General Housework" by Saidiya Hartman

Excerpt from Molloy by Samuel Beckett

Excerpt from Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

Selections from The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon

Excerpt from Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec

"Letter I: Hesitations Concerning Baptism" by Simone Weil

"Stingray" by Simone White

"It’s dissociation season" by Precious Okoyomon

"TOTAL LOL" by Sophie Robinson

"The Slow Read Movement and Lincoln’s Lost Speech" by Sparrow

"Inez, I Have to Gloat: You’re Gorgeous and Inez, When Someone Tells You You’re a Bitch" by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

"Where I Left Off" by Susie Timmons

"Falling for You" by Tim Johnson and Mark So

Selections from Up Your Ass by Valerie Solanas

"Goodbye Forever" by Steve Carey

Excerpt from La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc

Selection from The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Tom Cole

"Time" by Victoria Chang

"A Story that the United States is Made of and Pass" by Tongo Eisen-Martin

Excerpts from The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo

"MW Duet, Awake, Body, and Orlando" by Will Farris

After Words by Eileen Myles

Contributors

Credits

Acknowledgments

Introduction

In general poems are pathetic and diaries are pathetic. Really Literature is pathetic. Ask anyone who doesn’t care about literature. They would agree. If they bothered at all.

Perhaps the only accomplishment here is I’m saying that as an insider. This book is a kind of hollow. All these pieces of the rock (meaning Literature) long and short are just what I like. The invention of pathetic literature surely is Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book. More than a thousand years ago she kept her diaries, her interminable and adorable lists, her sovereignty to herself. Being discovered, she admits, kind of ruined things.

In light of our different pace I’d say we’re ready for ruin.

I need to start this book at the beginning which is to say how I landed on pathetic as a badge of distinction. In the late twentieth century there was a movement in visual arts known briefly as Pathetic Masculinity that has since vanished as a genre and simply became part of what we know. What exemplified pathetic art then was an orientation to crafts, to feeling, to the handmade and diaristic. It was kind of dykey. Using cuddly and abject stuff like stuffed animals rather than producing work that was determinedly abstract. There was a readymade aspect to a lot of it. And it wasn’t just any stuffed rabbit, it was the one you carried with you for all twenty-eight years of your childhood and now even to look at it produces trauma so the objects had secondary meaning too. Which is how it got to be art. And I have to say that pathetic art really pissed me off. Right out of the gate it resembled feminism. I mean give credit where credit is due! Feminist artists had long been appropriating crafts—not to be natural as the late Mike Kelley once said in an interview (as opposed to his own ‘ironic’ use of similar materials) but to deliberately hijack the production of doilies and hand-sewn cushions and knowhow away from the den of the patriarchal family in order to pump up the pleasure in collective women’s spaces and community activism.

Other feminists, Eleanor Antin and Mary Kelly, seized on the ubiquitous graphs and diagrams of sixties and seventies conceptual art to chart the veracities of domesticity like being descended upon by in-laws when you had a new kid. I heard one tale of a giant abstract painting on women’s land that basically was a giant menstrual chart of everyone living there. Feminists were pretty funny and also were using the materials of art to make a statement, to undo something, there was a utopian purpose as opposed to Mike’s being sad or Paul McCarthy bad. Their art was boyishly satanic cause they had suffered too. Nobody in the art world of the 90s enjoyed patriarchy (punk was against it) but good men and bad men and especially sad men made a terrific living in there whereas women more likely reaped the pathetic jouissance of community and later academic jobs. The story about seventies feminism is that it was dominated by white women which is not really true but what feminist artists and activists did share was a desire to undo white male dominance and the system itself. The work had a message or was definitely floating in one.

Which gets me to literature in that there are parts of the literary world where one can readily make political meaning with the messily colloquial, the hand-writ, the felt. I mean who gave Judy Grahn the authority to enclose an entire world, all its institutions, in a single poem, A Woman Is Talking to Death. Having been tossed from the military for being a lesbian in the early sixties she then turns out to be uniquely prepared to know everything. In 18 pages, so I’ve included the whole thing here. I’m eager for everyone to know this poem, a moment in time and a political folk art masterpiece. The tone shifts at will from vulnerability to pompousness. Lawrence Braithwaite in a chapter from Wigger slides a peephole open onto a druggy vortex where by means of a bit of graffiti scrawled on an office door an abused kid sends a valentine and rats on his teacher at once. It’s pithy horror syncopated by a poet (in prose). The variegated pieces of the rock in this collection make a whirling system of difference, young, established, yes Beckett’s in here, that old weirdo. But Gertrude Stein isn’t. I actually don’t think of her as pathetic. Burroughs is not pathetic. Ginsberg is. I had to stop myself while this volume is only immense.

I am definitely interested in the surprising edges or the forced march of a riveting pattern. And there’s something indeterminately true about each and every one. Sometimes it’s in the writer’s very willingness to make that gesture at all. To make this of that.

Like Robert Musil said of Robert Walser, he was sui generis, inimitable, his work being not a suitable foundation for a literary genre. Is that praise? Like you couldn’t start anything here. But what if that lack was the organizing force?

Samuel Delany tells us that in the gay porno theaters of Times Square (circa 1970–1989) men were not only getting blow jobs but were very often making friends. He essays for the dirty fealty of contact over networks. He met his own life partner in such a way. Each of these writers has a discomfort or a restlessness that exceeds their category somehow. Work that acknowledges a boundary then passes it. It being the hovering monolith, that bigger thing that confirms. There’s no institution, or subculture, where any of this all belongs. This gathering is not so much queer as adamantly, eloquently strange, and touching, as if language itself had to pause. Less an avant-garde than something really beside the point. Until it begins to steamroll. In literature there are so many little empires. If you begin in the state of poetry and I guess a great percentage of the writing here is that or is poetry-influenced so what we’re really talking about is a teeming hive of mini-fiefdoms. They don’t make an arc—unless it’s toward devastation like Victor Hugo.

I’ve collected whoever’s in here for their dedication to a moment that bends, not in a gay way but you know how when you’re walking towards the horizon it seemingly dips.* And you feel something. That’s pathetic. It’s an empathetic thing. The light shifts and biologically we turn too. People get different. Take the word crepuscular. The blue moment. Some creatures only come out right then. A lot of the world is trained to think of that part of existence as vacation or what happens during drinks but I’m saying that no I think it feels like a life. As a citizen of the United States I’m always surprised by where I live and how I live. Looking back on 2003 when George Bush was bombing the hell out of Iraq (and Joe Proulx shows us in An Obituary what that looked like on the ground) it’s clear the destruction of the world trade center handed George an opportunity.

Same way Hurricane Sandy is creating one right now here in New York (after doing nothing for nine years), turning East River Park, the most human playground where little league kids play and families barbecue on the poor side of the river into a vivid real estate opportunity. Rather than freedom and democracy they are calling it flood control. Because natural disasters yield development.

When I talk about the bigger world, bigger literature, bigger things that’s what I mean. Something with enormous resources and a singleness of purpose. Something that puts women’s names on storms. Is it just white supremacy and patriarchy and capitalism rolled into one. Does it have another name? Gwendolyn Brooks reporting the mundanity of being the only Black people in a movie theater and her 1950s narrator Maude Martha, lovingly noting the apricot stain on her partner’s shirt bring on the embodiment of being Black in this country more than a Hollywood account of Fred Hampton being shot in his bed.

Trayvon Martin got shot in a gated community because there were no Black people in there though there were. Racism is a language in the minds of white people that gets read onto the bodies of Black people (undoubtedly occupying their minds too) so that just being with his skittles in the wrong place is reason enough for a kid to be killed. The skittles are pathetic. Everyone knows about them. When Frank Wilderson describes (in Afropessimism) going as a teenager to Fred Hampton’s bullet-ridden apartment (which the Chicago Police Department kept open like a cautionary amusement park for ninety days) on a date, his story authenticates the horror. It inhabits it.

Cindy Sheehan’s 25-year-old son, U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan was killed in action in Iraq and so she met several months later with other military families and Bush who then pretty much kept bombing and destroying Iraq in the name of freedom. So Cindy Sheehan wanted to talk to him again. She sat at the end of George Bush’s street in Crawford, Texas, and waited. They called it Camp Casey. 1,500 people joined her. Sheehan said "if he even starts to say freedom and democracy, I’m gonna say, bullshit. You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. . . . You tell me that, you don’t tell me my son died for freedom and democracy." She also vowed not to pay her federal income tax for 2004. I mention Cindy Sheehan because I recall a conservative commentator called her that pathetic woman. Her sitting there, her famous act, meant that as a woman Cindy Sheehan was taking more space than she deserved. And that aspect of pathetic is what I am truly interested in here. The act of taking a little less or a little more. It’s the essence of a political meaning. A pathetic man is chatty, effusive, sort of gay-ish in the high school sense of the word but what does gay mean other than nonconforming. The space he is taking is a woman’s. You can’t take the wrong space, a woman’s space and be masculine.

Because gender is a counterweight to keep everything and every body in line. It’s a military formation. It’s our national poetics. We are free to be feminist here (and I remember going to Germany in the 90s on a literary tour and we were floored by how retro and patriarchal the German literary community was. Look at us, we crowed) but contempt flung at any woman who dares to approach the seat of power reveals how flammable, how violently reactive the slimy surface of our freedom and democracy is to anyone even nominally opposed to patriarchy. You can’t even say patriarchy exists. You can barely say in textbooks now that slavery existed. Or jails. Why are people opposed to wearing masks during a pandemic. Has the right to bear arms ever included Black men. We have a language of suppression and it keeps everyone in line and you can’t be too fat or too sick or too ambivalent or joyous or resistant or poor or hungry or loud or unstable (because outside of porn any deviation makes us feel the weight of your body = too heavy for democracy) so show us your type, then we will commodify you into another form of silence. Does Oprah talk or not.

It took about a hundred years for pathetic to mean mean. It went from pathetical to pathetic in the 19th century and it still meant something touching or pithy, felt, but then pathetic went negative real fast. Whatever brings up feeling in here must get squashed. The word didn’t do it by itself, but something closes in on us like a vice and all unlikely approaches will get slapped down. So what you’re stepping into here is a tiny monument for witnessing change, not of any one sort but of many sorts like a sex club of thought. A bar that serves only time in different and peculiar-sized doses.

When I saw how good Porochista Khakpour was at talking about being sick, what lengths she went to, how many plateaus of suffering she endured, I was delightedly aghast. She could just go and go. It’s so bold. It reminded me of what I once heard a male critic say at a party about a female artist. She’s an endless woman. The room got quiet. He had named his fear.

I’m not sure I can ever truly stay inside of the mind of Robert Walser. It makes me so uncomfortable. I first learned about him one day in the 80s on a drunken visit to poet and book dealer Gerrit Lansing in Gloucester, Mass., who regaled myself and David Rattray with a description of this Swiss writer from the turn of the century who wrote in bits and pieces changing directions at will depositing an entire novel on the corner of a napkin, doing everything at the absolutely wrong scale. Almost topographically, if you know what I mean. And in his almost manic directionlessness he created this extra space. He was sent to review a play and he reviewed the audience. It’s like ADHD taken to a pitch where it becomes useful if not spiritual. It was infectious. I didn’t read Walser for another ten years but even hearing about him gave me permission to write prose for the first time—if I could be volumetric. Take that pill and grow larger and then scrunch myself up if I wanted to be small.

The act of writing as we know is pathetic. I want to go out but I want to stay in. What torture it is to do this. I’m thinking about the enormity that Lucille Clifton conveys in simply looking at the bench that held the ass of a woman who was enslaved her whole life (Aunt Nanny) who could spell her own name and did it right here.

There’s no monument anywhere in America just like that because it’s pure apprehension. Ivan Dixon’s 1973 The Spook Who Sat by the Door actually showed Black militants holding guns and shooting white soldiers so of course our government would not let that be screened anywhere in the world for at least twenty years. And shouldn’t art make an action outside itself. That’s what I mean by feeling. Qiu Miaojin’s writing tugs inexorably toward her death, first Bunny (the pet rabbit) dies in the book’s dedication and now Zoë (Qiu) will die. And Angie is dying and Ed is dying and Nate’s mother died. And each death happens in a solution, in a differently constituted percentage of love or lovelessness. AIDS is a lot of the reason for this pathetic book. Some of us knew all about dying in the 80s while others were still whispering about who their one gay friend may’ve gotten it from. Just like now with covid where the people who die are often not my friends and entire zip codes in New York City have been decimated. The selectivity of the virus explains the resistance to the mask. What’s been politicized is a feeling that the disease knows who we are. It’s almost sung. I remember everyone’s horror when Dennis Cooper said AIDS ruined death. What we did learn is that everyone dies different. The horror of life is that everyone is dying, not now but eventually. It’s a horrible pact we make with existence and we became connoisseurs of how differently people get at it.

Looking at death, imagining it. Literature, this scraping sound, is a way we deal with that one unknowable space. I’m afraid of death, of my friends who are dying. I was afraid to go see Allen Ginsberg when he was dying. I was welcome (I think he even called me) but I was afraid to be that close to him at the moment (like Allen had to do all the loving) so Rosebud’s document gathering every pointillist detail of Allen’s dying still feeds my sense of loss at not having the courage to walk in. Each shred of story in here is a little machine of feeling that bends like this and that. Charline, my European friend, smiles at the difference between our pathetic and the one embedded in any romance language. It got ugly here. It should be our motto. You could say we invented slavery because we made it be our economy. We became modern. We made it everything and now we don’t know where to hide it. In our guns. We bail out banks but reparations for generations of damage is just not a real thing. I know that language changes by use, mostly in the mouth of the underclass, but I wonder if a book can be a new mouth and lips to re-make a word’s intention on this day in a culture.

If you deliberately go through the door the wrong way, many of us at once, I hear a whoosh, there’s this profound redundancy meaning we go to literature to describe states of being, of mind producing sudden and inexplicable feeling. Can a feeling go both ways. Can we hate and love. I would never argue why anyone needs poetry, but everyone can find a poem that elaborates a model responsible to their own way of thinking not so much for consolation as confirmation—it bestows on you a gestational feeling like it birthed you and you feel like you did it. It’s your double. What author has not had that feeling when they meet a reader and they smile at you like you are them. Yikes. It is so violating. And yet aesthetics will not protect you. You are not alone when someone thinks they can see your mind. Reading is a collaborative act. It takes away the once-ness of the world and gives it back repeatedly. And language is the loss that repairs.

Sallie gave me her old battered copy of Sei Shōnagon. It felt precious. I had heard of The Pillow Book for years. I figured it was too feminine for me. Turns out Warhol is a copy of her. Her lists beautiful redolent lists are so unlike her flip side Huysmans, who isn’t saying what he likes (or dislikes) or notices so much as what he’s covetously explored. It’s a masculine tack & it’s just not pathetic at all.

Masculinity being a cage that feels just great about itself.

And because that’s true, Bob Flanagan crawls in one literally and spends a weekend in there trying to eat shit.

Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is in here since he’s going back and forth through the door of gender perpetually. He’s formally pathetic—the famous black page sentimentalizes his friend Yorick’s death but then he does a little shimmy on the ole masculine contempt for women in lieu of what would more likely be a gray page, his absolute disinterest. He likes men.

I taught a Pathetic Literature seminar at UCSD in 2006 and we read Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy, Can Xue and Delany among others. Walser of course. We even had a pathetic conference. It was a late-night event, scantily attended. Chris Kraus came and I screened a wretched print of Warhol’s I, a Man with Valerie Solanas and it was so dark we really couldn’t see it at all. The sound was bad too. We had a pathetic panel and I’m sure I talked about foam. It would be my obsession for the next ten years because every book we read in the pathetic seminar had some left over froth in it. Like the action in all these novels and poems exceeded their own frame—some sludge sat right there on the water, there was spit on the corner of the boy’s mouth—you know how anxious kids used to produce spittle in grade school.

Every act had this extra dose of froth. Like the stories were bobbing in a vast and inexplicable solution, like the squeaking sounds I just heard coming out of the pasta I was cooking tonight. I got closer with my phone to record it but then the sounds stopped. What the hell was that. It wasn’t just pasta, or literature, but something tiny, mysterious, unjustly alive.

Eileen Myles

October 2021

---

* I got this idea from the poet Brian Teare.

ALICE NOTLEY

All my life,

since I was ten,

I’ve been waiting

to be in

this hell here

with you;

all I’ve ever

wanted, and

still do.

we’re the only colored people here

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

When they went out to the car there were just the very finest bits of white powder coming down with an almost comical little ethereal hauteur, to add themselves to the really important, piled-up masses of their kind.

And it wasn’t cold.

Maud Martha laughed happily to herself. It was pleasant out, and tonight she and Paul were very close to each other.

He held the door open for her—instead of going on around to the driving side, getting in, and leaving her to get in at her side as best she might. When he took this way of calling her lady and informing her of his love she felt precious, protected, delicious. She gave him an excited look of gratitude. He smiled indulgently.

Want it to be the Owl again?

Oh, no no, Paul. Let’s not go there tonight. I feel too good inside for that. Let’s go downtown?

She had to suggest that with a question mark at the end, always. He usually had three protests. Too hard to park. Too much money. Too many white folks. And tonight she could almost certainly expect a no, she feared, because he had come out in his blue work shirt. There was a spot of apricot juice on the collar, too. His shoes were not shined. . . . But he nodded!

We’ve never been to the World Playhouse, she said cautiously. They have a good picture. I’d feel rich in there.

You really wanta?

Please?

Sure.

It wasn’t like other movie houses. People from the Studebaker Theatre which, as Maud Martha whispered to Paul, was all-locked-arms with the World Playhouse, were strolling up and down the lobby, laughing softly, smoking with gentle grace.

There must be a play going on in there and this is probably an intermission, Maud Martha whispered again.

I don’t know why you feel you got to whisper, whispered Paul. Nobody else is whispering in here. He looked around, resentfully, wanting to see a few, just a few, colored faces. There were only their own.

Maud Martha laughed a nervous defiant little laugh; and spoke loudly. There certainly isn’t any reason to whisper. Silly, huh.

The strolling women were cleverly gowned. Some of them had flowers or flashers in their hair. They looked—cooked. Well cared-for. And as though they had never seen a roach or a rat in their lives. Or gone without heat for a week. And the men had even edges. They were men, Maud Martha thought, who wouldn’t stoop to fret over less than a thousand dollars.

We’re the only colored people here, said Paul.

She hated him a little. Oh, hell. Who in hell cares.

Well, what I want to know is, where do you pay the damn fares.

There’s the box office. Go on up.

He went on up. It was closed.

Well, sighed Maud Martha, I guess the picture has started already. But we can’t have missed much. Go on up to that girl at the candy counter and ask her where we should pay our money.

He didn’t want to do that. The girl was lovely and blonde and cold-eyed, and her arms were akimbo, and the set of her head was eloquent. No one else was at the counter.

Well. We’ll wait a minute. And see—

Maud Martha hated him again. Coward. She ought to flounce over to the girl herself—show him up. . . .

The people in the lobby tried to avoid looking curiously at two shy Negroes wanting desperately not to seem shy. The white women looked at the Negro woman in her outfit with which no special fault could be found, but which made them think, somehow, of close rooms, and wee, close lives. They looked at her hair. They liked to see a dark colored girl with long, long hair. They were always slightly surprised, but agreeably so, when they did. They supposed it was the hair that had got her that yellowish, good-looking Negro man.

The white men tried not to look at the Negro man in the blue work shirt, the Negro man without a tie.

An usher opened a door of the World Playhouse part and ran quickly down the few steps that led from it to the lobby. Paul opened his mouth.

Say, fella. Where do we get the tickets for the movie?

The usher glanced at Paul’s feet before answering. Then he said coolly, but not unpleasantly, I’ll take the money.

They were able to go in.

And the picture! Maud Martha was so glad that they had not gone to the Owl! Here was technicolor, and the love story was sweet. And there was classical music that silvered its way into you and made your back cold. And the theater itself! It was no palace, no such Great Shakes as the Tivoli out south, for instance (where many colored people went every night). But you felt good sitting there, yes, good, and as if, when you left it, you would be going home to a sweet-smelling apartment with flowers on little gleaming tables; and wonderful silver on night-blue velvet, in chests; and crackly sheets; and lace spreads on such beds as you saw at Marshall Field’s. Instead of back to your kit’n’t apt., with the garbage of your floor’s families in a big can just outside your door, and the gray sound of little gray feet scratching away from it as you drag up those flights of narrow complaining stairs.

Paul pressed her hand. Paul said, We oughta do this more often.

And again. We’ll have to do this more often. And go to plays, too. I mean at that Blackstone, and Studebaker.

She pressed back, smiling beautifully to herself in the darkness. Though she knew that once the spell was over it would be a year, two years, more, before he would return to the World Playhouse. And he might never go to a real play. But she was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

When the picture was over, and the lights revealed them for what they were, the Negroes stood up among the furs and good cloth and faint perfume, looked about them eagerly. They hoped they would meet no cruel eyes. They hoped no one would look intruded upon. They had enjoyed the picture so, they were so happy, they wanted to laugh, to say warmly to the other outgoers, Good, huh? Wasn’t it swell?

This, of course, they could not do. But if only no one would look intruded upon. . . .

People Without Names

THE FRIEND

My therapist says you are unavailable.

She means emotionally unavailable, of course.

A phrase that is like a death sentence

among the salty hills of Los Angeles,

pabulum of gurus, isotopes and glue.

And I know, like a second breath,

where I secretly breathe always,

with hidden lungs and emissary logic,

that you have always been unavailable—

and this is your immense appeal to me,

not as torture device,

the mills of catholic monasteries englassed,

but as inner truth, preferred and true.

You will have future lovers,

and you will be glad and bored,

alike indifferent, converted or annealed,

like a band of trifling steel clippings

magnetized by the obstinacy of a door stop.

Shaved pubes of the peach or a snarling

dog lip put in the wrong painting:

they are neither here nor there. Truly.

I prefer the glass of my phone to crack,

and be taken away;

for the miserable inscrutable odor of saints,

to arrive at the harness of the window,

drunk like a kettle, fearless,

and gradually amused, like an ugly plant

that refuses to grow or die,

but sticks with the needles of invisible light,

dignified to irrelevance.

To want nothing from you is what

we already have; the theater of these muscles;

muted vestments, eyes (blighted) passed

around; my unobtrusive ghost

thumping like cattle on the sill.

What is specifically new about anyone?

My body has been used and disposed of;

the crimped sleeve of a fresh collared shirt

looms like a patrician’s house

tucked into ancient prairies,

where back pain is veneer, vermillion sky;

a thistle stuck in the toe of January.

The agreement is always this, unavailable one,

you will circle, all mental crucible,

expending and taking energy, lav-

ishly—honey for the hive, world without bees;

some sweet-fire near the splashing intersection of

conversations clotted on a crosswalk

by a crudely over lit gas station. As long

as I do not look into your eyes when I speak to you—

I know I say anything. And though

I travel through desert statuary, escaping

even the memory of my own failed desires,

redundant pungency, memoirs of the eel,

I will find you, be found; onboard a bus,

in the early light of too many centuries ago,

you board. Rattling with compartments;

shuffling stiff on mildew seats after dawn; now

sharpen the claws of our indifference.

No one cackles in the beige pocketbook languidly.

No one erects a squinting parakeet. But they

could for you, and you’d take it—coldly—

as you hover through the naked aisles.

And you will sit down next to me, in the thousand

rows of this bus, that indeterminably change

and empty while the agreement, issued,

is repeated. As long as I look, I cannot speak;

as long as I can’t see what I do see, I might as well

say anything. When I falter like furniture,

you evaporate like a headache. The

punching clock is drunk with more than prayers.

I am leafing through the venial sins of elders;

their hairy tomes and brittle pearls.

To this salutary urn, I also bow. But

you would remind me of the agreement;

the astuteness of your posture; the

fact that you are exact and final—

the flowers, not liquid, are flesh.

Inconstancy stammers too whitely.

I imagine in your infinite backpack

there is a woman persona, whose name

is like the prefecture of emeralds;

in a world beyond and before gender,

where you are spoken of in totality

that has nothing to do with the undisclosed

violence of all households. The letter M.

Magic is not your name; or the real one.

Marring the opportunity, I find a new way

to break the commandment of fathers

and dead fathers. I write you into this poem;

gambling on too-recent rigidity.

Tucked around the corner from or exiting

out the café of an indecent futuristic movie,

it is impossible to plan how guarded

and vacant your hold on generosity may yet be.

The missing persons of the library clap

shut when we ask if the letters swim against

each other in the empty, static night.

When did you not love the unavailable one?

How can there be this real something,

more perfect than refusal,

in which the suffering of our mothers,

our trans childless souls, speak without language

in the seesaw utility belt drawbridge west of all heres.

Siroccos are somersaults; winding oscillations

of the gutter harp trill; these

are proximate symbols;

whereas you are approximate and never flinch.

I avow the old enemy returns.

Penicillin heaters chug and chatter.

The unavailable one through a river of bruises;

utility bills; post-political upheavals;

an adversary fog twilled with chewable vitamins.

Lint shrapnel reminds that wars are

inside/across bodies of gendered stamps;

crudely botched by names and accents;

harkened to with gaudy travail.

When everyone goes home from their favorite

paragraph, and I am set to put the seals

on certain periods and chubby syllables,

I slump down in the gusty oratory of stacks,

in lop-sided winters in city offices.

The argument isolates itself backwardsly.

No one believes that I have seen you

folded in the rectangle of tissue paper;

watched you cry at deprivation tanks.

He conceals this lanky shoe of she;

and I am not allowed to utter her name.

But one time, while rowing across the lobby,

with a kitchen thrown down inside it,

like a mystic wooden knee cap,

I clutched the sides of that name

in neon distribution and unqualified praise.

I am looking at you and saying it.

And because you are not here, nor would be,

I know now, you are readying to receive

this familiar queer-adjacent violence we share.

There is time for silence. There is still time.

Loveland

KEVIN KILLIAN

I grew up in Smithtown, a suburb of New York, a town so invidious that still I speak of it in Proustian terms—or Miltonic terms, a kind of paradise I feel evicted from. Smithtown, Long Island, kind of an MGM Norman Rockwell hometown, a place so boring they gave it a boring name . . . When I was 14 I began to go to New York on a regular basis, sometimes on the train, sometimes hitchhiking there, looking for a jungly eroticism I supposed Smithtown, with its manicured lawns and its country club airs, couldn’t afford me. I was right and wrong at the same time.

By day or night New York’s a seedy Burroughs kind of place, and hurrying down the street I could hardly catch my breath, there were so many affecting things to watch and so much architecture. At Gristede’s all the food’s so expensive I felt I knew why everyone in Manhattan’s so thin, but it seemed worth it, and thus I found myself buying things I never wanted before—simple things like: apple. Doughnut. Cup of coffee. I took a job clerking there for a month and famous people, like Jackie Kennedy, would come in off the street and buy these very same things. These would be my dinner; a fellow I knew in school had a cigarette, a cup of coffee and the Daily News when he woke up every morning, and he called it the chorus girls’ breakfast. I knew another guy who always carried the same book in his back pocket, like Bruce Springsteen that red bandanna. A book of poetry: Bob Kaufman’s Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. I loved him for that: I used to touch the book in his pocket and feel direct connection to the ancient rain of San Francisco, now my home then only a mysterious flavor like guava, succulent, almost too rich. I used to tell him, You are so cute with that book, and he would smile, unwillingly, as though he’d pledged never to reveal his connection to poetry.

The subway ride to his house seemed endless. Sealed in with the dismal frightened figures of subway America, I couldn’t help but feel different and special, in that I was heading towards a love life that, I imagined, would have frightened them more, would have made them more dismal. Loveland I called it, as though it were an address like Rockefeller Center. It’s when you look into someone’s sunglasses and try to see his eyes, or the space you feel rolling over a cliff or a ramble. From these two fellows I took the sense that being a New Yorker involved high style, one was so camp with his chorus girls’ breakfast and his operatic airs, the other so serious, a walking dictionary of soulful poetry like Kaufman. Camp and Seriousness themselves became characters I could cruise first, then nuzzle, then accept or decline.

Life’s so much simpler here in San Francisco.

Then I was 20, still convinced New York’s the most dangerous place in the world. I came out of the subway once, for example, and Francis Coppola was filming The Godfather. The cameras whirled as I made my entrance. I blinked and smiled, and lingered till I heard the word Cut. One of the little people asked me to step aside so that Richard Conte, who was waiting inside the car, could get his face on screen. If you want me to I will, I said. You guys making a movie? Can I be in it more than I am already? He explained that it was a period piece and that was why everyone was dressed in forties suits and hats. I love those suits, I told him. I love those hats men used to wear.

Sorry, he said.

Out on the street it was four o’clock in the afternoon and girls were wearing summer dresses and acting soignée. My favorite time of day. A large cloud, pumped full of black gases, loomed overhead. I felt goosebumps, perhaps because I was tripping. In my pocket a handful of red crystals, wrapped in pliofilm, gave me a kind of sexual energy I haven’t felt since, and plus I made money this way, and plus I felt powerful, ambitious, and also I had lots of friends (and what they say about New York is true: eight million people, each with a different story to tell and a different drug habit); plus I was a homosexual primitive like a Frida Kahlo mural the Feds tear down.

In winter up on Carey’s fire escape at East End Avenue and 86th Street I wrapped myself in a bearskin and sat there telling my diary the story of the novel I hoped one day to write. This will make me famous, I thought. And what was fame, I felt, but an extension of my present being? I was seeing a man who had picked me up hitchhiking when I was in junior high, out on Long Island where I grew up. We’d known each other for six years—I’d grown a foot taller and my hair had changed color and I used to wonder, If I grow any taller will I still be loved? His name was Carter, but I called him Carey.

The night we met I noticed how warm his car was. A piece of toast. I’d sat shivering in it, in a black jacket and white buckskin shoes. Where are you headed? he said.

Take me to New York, I said.

Show me where it is on the map, Carey said, producing a large roadmap from his glove compartment and unfolding it like an accordion across the width of the car. His right hand fell unerringly to my lap. The names of the roads on the map blurred before my eyes like sudden tears. Show me where it is, he said once or twice, all the while playing with my prick. That’s how I fell in love.

In many ways a cold fish, Carey was capable of surprising me with extravagant gestures I thought showed some emotion. He gave me a hundred dollars once. Another time he came out of a taxi filled with balloons to cheer me up after a depressing exam in Linguistics. Still I used to wonder, Now that I’m blond no longer how much longer will we be tied together? Even at 18, or should I say especially at 18, I knew balloons were corny and I squirmed and hoped to God none of my friends were watching. But as the taxi sped north up Third Avenue, the colors, the warm rubber suffocation, had the power to send fleets of taxicabs over the pier and into the blue and gray Hudson.

His wife I never cared for. She had a critical eye on me from the time I was 14. They lived in an apartment designed by Architectural Digest. Once I woke up there and only she was home. Anita gave me a steely look but fixed me a boloney sandwich, though she kept rattling the knife around in the mustard jar like she was having a nervous breakdown or something. I sat at her kitchen table, nervous myself, twiddling my thumbs and rapping the underside sharply like a seance. Quit fidgeting, Anita told me.

It was eight in the morning, and outside the sky was full of orange light, white clouds scuttling across the horizon towards Brooklyn Harbor. Under her cool black-eyed gaze, the white jockey shorts Carey insisted I wear seemed a little de trop at breakfast. I crossed my legs. Then spread them wide. I’m reading a really good book, I said at a stab. "One Hundred Years of Solitude." I thought this was a clever touch because Anita came from some Central American country or another, probably the same one Bianca Jagger did.

But she merely turned her head impassively and dropped the sandwich onto a plate, thrusting it my way. Eat, she said. Eat and don’t talk. How much of my love life she knew about I’m not sure. It was as taboo as anything in Levi-Strauss. Carey had a respectable life and liked it like that. He was capable of affection, although not in public, usually in a car.

Even when it was happening to me, I thought, This will make a good story someday, but now that I think of it, its story’s not that good at all. More important than its plots, it’s the quality of feeling that strikes me now—something out of this world, outlandish in its literal sense. I had a pair of white shoes and a black jacket I used to regard in the same way, draping them atop chairs and talking to them in the stylish, sophisticated accents of David Niven or Peter Lawford. I love those shoes, I would say to an imaginary visitor. I love that jacket.

At my high school graduation I saw his face in the crowd. Afterwards I tried to find him, though I don’t know what I would have done with him if I had. But anyhow I couldn’t. Later he denied having been there, but with one of those roguish twinkles that can pass for truth or a joke. I was not hallucinating, I said. I saw you there.

I think you’ve been smoking too many bananas. I never found his drug humor amusing, the way some people are turned off by bathroom humor.

You were wearing your gray suit with a green tie.

The luck of the Irish.

You must have just gotten your hair cut.

Oh sure, he said, could you smell the talcum powder?

Bay rum I smelled, I said. And you had a hard-on.

Oh well then, that couldn’t have been I, he said.

We drove somewhere in Westchester and entered an antique watermill preserved from Colonial times for its shock value. There, on its dusty wooden floor, he asked me what I wanted out of life. Not to be like you, I said, first to annoy him, then also because it was true, plus he had a hard-on. I really liked being desired. And I liked money and kept hoping he would give me another hundred dollars. He kept peering around afraid that the caretaker would spot us. I liked the dangerous aspects of our affair, I liked even the fact that he did not. I thought that otherwise he would long since have tired of me and sought out someone else, someone younger, someone 12 or 13. He seemed old to me then, but working out our birth dates I realized sometime later that he must have been 35 when we met, and since that’s my age now I get goosebumps. Here in San Francisco in October the sky is a pale and delicate blue, like a robin’s egg in a child’s picture book.

It’s four o’clock in the afternoon as I write this: my favorite time of day. A car is moving slowly down the street, pushed from behind by two sweating workmen in grayish overalls. I want it to roll down the hill. I want its trunk to leave their hands. I want them to stumble a bit in surprise, then begin chasing the car, as it picks up speed and strips its gears, then they fall back out of breath and grow fatalistic. Then the car plunges off the cliff and you see the faces of the lovers rising from the back seat, steamed in a kiss, the kiss they can’t feel, and you see the car hit a rocky mesa way down below. From vertiginous heights I watch and smoke a cigarette, humming a little tune and acting very debonair. I am reminded of a misspent youth—someone’s misspent youth, not necessarily mine.

Once Anita was knitting me a sweater and waxing sarcastic: how kind Carey was, taking a disadvantaged child out of the suburbs, bringing him to Manhattan! Fresh Air Fund except in reverse, she snorted.

Well I need to get streetwise, I said, brush some of the country cobwebs off me.

Carey’s not the man to teach street smarts. We were mugged by three Guatemalan borrachos on Lexington and Carey told them to take the Lady Seiko that they didn’t even know I had.

He helps me with my school work, I said.

She said nothing, kept rocking and knitting. Presently she spoke again. "Espera, she said, her voice and face deadpan. Espera Kevin."

Esperanto you mean, I cried. Talk English to me, you know I don’t understand that loco lingo of yours.

When you grow up I will talk to you, not now. If you want a sandwich you know how to make one, so go.

I do want a sandwich, I said. I’m so awfully hungry.

How are your parents and your brothers and sisters and boys’ school?

I guess everything’s fine, I said, suddenly frightened. Tell Carey I’ll wait for him in the car, okay? I’ll skip the sandwich, all right?

She shrugged. If I see him I’ll tell him. The needles began to flash in the light. In English, she added. In the language you and he have.

When it came time for me to go to college I picked one in New York, actually three, but that’s a different story. In my cheap room, all grays and whites and pinks, he and I met one night so I could tell him it was over. Carey washed his face in the bathroom and came out with water cupped in his hands. He threw the water on my face, meaning to wake me up. My classes are all very interesting this semester, I said, ignoring him. Sometimes I feel like an ashtray—like you’re a cigarette and you put yourself out in me. Ever wish you had passed me by on that highway? I bet you do, cause I’ve caused you grief. I didn’t really believe this. But I got to like you, Carey, your candy breath, your mouth stuffed with cotton, your pleasant gray eyes. O baby don’t come.

He wasn’t about to come; coming was far from his mind. He stood up and pulled off his pants. What is the trick of description, that writers must use? How do I make him more clear, vivid, real—or even imaginary? You know the film actress Rosanna Arquette? He had the sulky pouting look of a male Rosanna Arquette. But what happens if you don’t know her? I could say: Pia Zadora; Brigette Bardot: but at each remove the similarity fades a bit more, so you don’t get my picture. Shall I stick to Rosanna? But then I’ll seem obscure, oblique. He had the sulky pouting look of a male Rosanna Arquette, while I, who knew I could never pull that off, thought it politic to ape the vacuous, slightly zombie drug stare of the 50’s singer Johnnie Ray.

Carey told me so many stories about growing up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, that I came to feel I knew as much about that city as he did. One of the stories was of a little boy who worked a paper route, all summer long, to earn enough money to buy a suit for the first day of school. The paper he sold published his picture on their front page. So Carey and some other boys pushed this boy in a ditch and laughed at him and pissed all over his neck and throat and chest. Sometimes I felt like that paper boy, that all my love did for him was to give him a big laugh.

You want ice cream, Kevin? he said. He put his pants back on and zipped up the fly. I’ll go down to the store.

Sometimes I feel like a piece of paper, I said. That you wrote your name on then pissed on.

What flavor? said Carey. I know your favorite.

I don’t want any ice cream, I said. Why don’t you take off your pants and listen to me? I loved him so much I couldn’t let him out of the room. He had had everything and I had only been able to give him just a little. Remember that old woman who lived at the end of the block and you were never allowed to step on her lawn?

I remember, he said gravely, his pants round his knees.

"She’d come running out of her house to chase you away if you stepped in her yard, a lawn so shabby and unkempt you never understood why she got into such a dither about it. After you broke her mailbox with your fists, she came calling on your mother in moth-eaten black widow’s weeds with a calling card and a reticule. I feel like that old eccentric widow woman—that you’re the meanest boy on the block. Under my windows I crouch and wait till you’ve stopped vandalizing my house. Then I straighten up and breathe again. She smelled like mothballs and sour cheese and her house was unpainted and one day she was dead. She had turned up the gas to light the stove and she fell forward, asleep, while her face burned away. It burnt completely away like strips of bacon leaving only grease and fat behind. Sometimes I feel I’d like to burn in Hell with no face if it meant you wouldn’t be looking into my eyes with your Devil’s look. Your mother