Eileen Myles: Love has always taken me on

Eileen Myles comes on the bike. Hen has been and turned in to the apartment after a session in the gym. To Mogador on St. Mark's Place in the East Village yesterday, Eileen Myles daily, sometimes several times per day, to drink coffee and meet people. It has hen made in decades. The apartment a couple of blocks away, is too tight for other than intimate encounters, a single room. This måndagsförmiddag in march, it is quiet on the stammisstället, less than every second table is occupied.

– the East Village has changed a lot since I came here in the 70's. Nowadays is hundrastgården empty in the daytime, Eileen Myles pointing in the direction of Tompkins Square Park, and continues All the work all the days, before there was no one here who worked on that way. It has become a professional area.

during the course of an hour. ”What did you think of yesterday?” they ask. It was a release party for a book; ”the Last days at the hot slit”, a collection of Andrea How texts. All of New York's lesbian and feminists were there, sufflerar Myles between the hugs and the kiss on the cheeks.

– There are not many living who I am anymore, people are busy. When I was young, I took something atrocious job a week per month in order to cover the costs, the rest of the time I did other things. It then went. Now I have to really strain myself to keep life simple, do get things done and preserve the time up But I love it even if I am quite alone about it. I recreate the fountain of youth, stripped of freedom in my different bodies.

It is something with the youth, and Eileen Myles. They belong together. On his poesiläsningar crowd to an audience where many are under 30. Eileen Myles himself turns 70 this year. It seems incredible, and it's not about skin, hair or figure. It's about energy. Myles rose is slängigt, posture relaxed, century similarly, peppered with förbindliga-up words, you know.

”Chelsea girls”. It is a nyckelroman published in 1994 in the united states but only now is published in Swedish. It is about the time that Myles refers to, then all were not working the whole days, that is to say, the '70s and' 80s.

Romanjaget named Eileen Myles. She – for it is a she, unlike the author Eileen Myles who, since a period of time identify themselves with the gender-neutral hen or the English singular they – move in the book to New York to become a poet. She lives from hand to mouth. She likes to be full and to be in love with and she is not either she need only to rent, cigarettes and coffee.

– my girlfriend and I actually wanted to make independent films but we were just too messy and poor then to get to it. Instead, I started writing down our life as if it were a movie, I documented what people said and what happened. It was from the beginning a documentary idea, but soon it began to happen with the time in the text, it behaved differently than the time in reality, " says Eileen Myles.

was the subtitle of the novel and not autobiography or memoir.

" I think of the definitive fiction of the writing. What is happening in the text will always be something other than what is happening in the room or in the body.

Eileen Myles grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts. The father was a postman at Harvard university and dragged the pretty notebooks and pens from work. At home it was tight on space and money, and the writing soon became a place where Eileens Myles could be private and escape her mother's controlling gaze and expectations. Later became a hen along with his brother, the first in the family to study at the college. The parents hoped for a respected and stable careers for their children. But then the writing has already taken root in Eileen Myles.

in 1974, moved Eileen Myles from Massachusetts to New York. Those who had previously been idols, Allen Ginsberg, for example, now became his friends. Photo: Emil Wesolowski

In ”the Chelsea girls” revoked childhood poetdröm: ”I would be a since, I would make everyone so sad and be so cool.”

It was not hippie, not the punk, it was since that was the thing. On Halloween dressed we, like everyone else out us. For me it was also an opportunity to express a different gender identity. I was always killbeatnik in black jeans and a black beret and for those who took the I expressed a poem.

There was another thing also. Mother was an orphan. She always told us that our childhood was wonderful while her had been miserable. So it is that I wanted to be a poet and make all so sad, was also a way to compete with my mother about suffering. Childish, but I think it contributed to the dream.

though it is not the suffering that characterizes Myles poems. On the contrary. Even when they are about loss and poverty are confidence and an enviable aptitude for enjoyment. Everything appears to be achievable with Myles.

" Love has always taken me on. I think that I've been closest to, depending of the loaded experience as being in love means. I have wanted to for the total change that the put in the time in me. I love the change.

the celebrity status is writing great enemy. At the same time makes the success that I'm not worried about me losing my apartment because I now can get a new one.

" I have made that it is just to hold out when everything is terrible, miserable, afterward will always be something else. It is not possible to keep fixed in either despair or elation, it doesn't matter what you want. It is not the state.

– Type.

in 1974, moved Eileen Myles from Massachusetts to New York. Those who had previously been idols, Allen Ginsberg, for example, now became his friends. Myles became a part of the business The poetry roject in St. Mark's Church and lyrikdebuterade in 1978 with the poetry collection ”The irony of the Leash”.

He also wrote a novel that the big publishers would refuse on the grounds that it lacked dramaturgical arc. 1994 was ”the Chelsea girls” up and published by the independent publisher Black sparrow press where kassakon called Charles Bukowski.

" I was a bit puzzled after the book had come out. I thought: this is a female ”On operation”, why is it not a bestseller?

a few years ago went of the novel, only to get hold of at the library and to the high price on the secondary market. But in 2015, it was published again in the united states. Time has caught up with it.

– Then, in the 90's, there were not many who wanted to read about young, depraved and alcoholic women. The pleasure of such a topic was unclear for a broad readership. It is a fairly new thing to provide women with the humanity in the art, to allow them to be packed, declared, funny or just weird. In this way, ”Chelsea girls” a message from the past that people now want to hear, it is a literary lesbian heritage, " says Eileen Myles.

Eileen Myles's novel, ”the Chelsea girls” depicts a catholic upbringing, and life as a young poet and openly lesbian

– It is a problem. With the success follows the interviews and a lot of talk in which it reinforces and repeats what you already said, thought and written. Thus, you write less. The celebrity status is writing great enemy. At the same time makes the success that I did not worry me to lose my apartment since I now can get a new one. So it is a paradox. That is all.

Eileen Myles has gone from, as he himself describes it to be a högröstad flat – i.e. generally invisible – to a person everyone wants to talk about sex, language and gender. Despite the fact that sexuality is not a literary leitmotif of Myles, rather a starting point as the hen normalizes by not extensively comment or to address it.

as a writer to write beautiful, sensual stories should be seen as normal, in the same way as it is among people generally seen as normal to be heterosexual. But that is not how I live. For me is strange poetry is the main thing, to be queer is of the essence. I see it as my job as an artist to bring the periphery into the centre, to make the periphery to the center.

" Absolutely." It works against the realism flatness and conventionality.

" Well. You can see at the centre as a framework that everything in the world passes through. At a certain moment flutters in so cases, even the weird poet by the where context. To be in the center is temporary, it is a place to pass.