“I wanted to say,” Eileen Myles begins the Acknowledgments section of their new collection, “a ‘Working Life’ means the poems are the plan, not that this book is about labor exactly.” It’s a characteristic line of theirs. What pretends to be simple and explanatory in fact complicates rather than clarifies, adds with one phrase, “the poems are the plan,” a layer of confident gnomic pronouncement. The poems in a “Working Life” likewise pretend to be transparent and diaristic, following Myles’ musings and wanderings. Yet what their free style masks is a calculated experimentation with and expansion of Myles’s poetics — a new clutch of poems that doesn’t backtrack but rather illuminates a new and darker aesthetic, a consideration of what we have when we’re alone.
Eileen Myles’s own professional life in poetry is certainly succeeding. They’ve received a bevy of grants, fellowships and awards, from Lambda to Guggenheim. They’ve published over a dozen collections of poetry, several works of fiction, a book of art writing, a “nonfiction” book from the POV of their pitbull, an operatic libretto, stage plays, and a self-described “super-8 puppet road film.” They’ve been close friends with every big name from the second half of your college poetry anthology, and they’ve taken up a good chunk of it themselves. In addition, Myles is an anomaly, a poet who has become, at 73, a cultural figure if in a minor key. The Clinton campaign asked them to write a poem in 2016. The TV show Transparent based a character on them. They’ve started to become famous for being famous.
a “Working Life,”written in the wake of such success, displays a few different aspects of Myles’s broad appeal. What strikes one first about Myles is their sonority. On the page or on the stage, Myles has an effortless and charismatic delivery, a feigned lack of affect that obscures a boiling surfeit of it. Even in an oral artform, few poets are more gripping readers of their own work than Myles. They pause at the right time, rush at the right time, and avoid the dreaded Poet Voice to which we’ve lost so many greats. Myles reads their poems in preserved Boston vowels and always as if improvised, or as if they’ve written them just then on the walk up to the mic. Such looseness begets, in the collection’s best poems, shocking moments of clarity and euphony.
One way Myles produces this improvisatory quality in a “Working Life” is to respond to and play off their immediate surroundings. Each poem preserves in its details the present moment of its inspiration. Poem titles dedicate or mark occasions or moments of insight. In “September 7,” for instance, a day spent around old churches and statues in Brooklyn spurs thoughts about the speaker’s lack of purpose. Little more than listening to birdsong on the morning of “May 8-9” leads to the origin of poetry itself in “some constant / tweeting.” And Myles’ own work talks and tweets at those around them. “Susan / was there / inside / the house,” they remember in “For Charles,” and “Emma / too.” “For My Friend” closes, “Amy I wish / you luck.” The poems bring us into relationships and assume a familiarity that we don’t have but want. If we’d only draw closer, it suggests, maybe we could join them.
What moves one further is the surprising, abrupt, perfectly rendered lines that such an intimate voice draws the reader toward. In “Jason Throws a Bolt,”after a succession of natural images, the speaker realizes, “I’m that / part / of nature / that doesn’t / know / it so / well.” The chaotic mood of “Monday Shit” produces as an opener, “I don’t know if I’m knowing something or falling / apart.” Perhaps the most abrupt turn occurs toward the end of the collection’s highlight:
Archer
There’s no
elsewhere
like this
the thing
knocks
around
in the jar
and ev
eryone’s
talking
it’s wind
blackness
holds strings
I don’t
know
what
else
holding night
by myself
I’m not
alone
though I
wish
you were
here
Each of these revelations seems a surprise even to Myles, who confesses in “March 3,” in a revelation about their revelations, “The poetry / of accident / haunts / like a circus / tent over / my days.” Such a formulation, of course, also appears stumbled upon, as is Myles’ way, but it perfectly describes Myles’ poetics. The “poetry of accident” comes about because of how much Myles’ voice is constantly swallowing the world around them. For Myles, everything — an occasion, a friend, surrounding sounds and chatter, a memory, a sudden thought — is part of the poem. The poems are the plan, but they can’t be planned for. Such is their working life.
This radical openness is what makes reading their work so thrilling and so dangerous. Even so late in their career, they’re willing to experiment, take risks on the page, and resist the calcification that can set in when a poet becomes established. As much of a genius as James Tate was, by his mid-career books we knew what a James Tate poem was. At this point, we all think we already know an Eileen Myles poem — skinny and cool and ambling — but Myles is convinced we’re wrong. The poems of a “Working Life” are willing to try out something different in front of you, and their style makes it seem to happen on the spot.
Sometimes the experiments appear unfinished. Always fond of short lines and frequent breaks, Myles tries out a new technique of what we might call word breaks, splitting a word in two (with no hyphen) over a line break, sometimes to interesting effect and sometimes not. In “WTF,” Myles splits “ref / rigerator,” for instance. If the reader is generous, they can acknowledge that the first part of the word, ref, is short for referee sometimes, and there’s a possible misdirect that could add some interesting meaning to the lines, maybe. In the well-titled “jihad,” the splitting of “att / ached” does create a nice irony of being visually detached. But what, exactly, splits like “Charles bu / kowski” or “Bos / ton” are supposed to do isn’t quite clear.
Perhaps the more meaningful experiment, however, occurs when Myles’s poems start talking about mortality. “March 3” finds the speaker awake one morning after emailing a lover and caught in a pre-coffee, early morning haze. It has snowed the night before, and “everything’s closed the streets / are wet,” and the speaker gets caught up in their wistful musings. A former lover rises from their dreams, and this morning the empty doorway looks “flooded / with ghosts.” They’re hit, as we all are on such mornings, by a sense of emptiness, “this sweet / accumulation” of space around themselves. The speaker takes stock of “the bowls u liked,” a “this / chaotic / museum / of stuff,” the lines of the poem stacked around them like trinkets, strays left from their working life, what they have to show for their years alone.
New to the speaker of “March 3,” though — a new everything to be part of the poem — is that, they realize, “I / begin to / write / about dying.” Even as they are, healthy and successful and lauded, death “begins to be part of the plot.” It hangs in the air around the poems, the possessions, it must be reckoned with. Poetry halts at its gravest accident. The speaker asks a question — only to realize halfway through that there’s no one to answer — and it becomes a statement:
My dead
mother
is around
my lover
not far
keeping u
here by
not calling
anyone
is that the tub
in which
I die.
[Published by Grove Press on April 18, 2023, 288 pages, $26.00 US, hardcover]