Just Chipping Away

The past week (and a bit) I’ve been reading Eileen Myles (The Importance of Being Iceland) enjoying the exhiliration of her voice and rhythm of her thinking. That’s a phrase: as is the phrase in the phrasing. A stance and a way of coming in at it.

So many lines come off the page, make you raise your eyes, pause, lift the lid off the can of life. Such as? Poetry and the window. And she’s so right – who wouldn’t want to write in their right/wrong mind? And her way of seizing an occasion – accident, vomiting, life crisis etc. – it all feeds in. And why it’s imperative I read some of her poems (Sorry, Tree might arrive tomorrow).

Knowing I am not – or so I’d assume – her ‘intended’ audience. (Male, 46, GSOH, straight, square, unhip). Or perhaps that’s the point. Why I need ‘my’ Iceland. To see what it feels to be glacial, volcanic, in the making, out on the northern margins of the maps. The trope of frozen wastes in 19^thC fiction as the female landscape. Ms. Mary Shelley Godwin Wollstonecraft Frankenstein Creature frozen out, on thin ice, cold shouldered by the patriarchal Big Society. Slippery when wet. Here are new temperature logics: hot (erotic) with cold not as its opposite. ‘Cool’ won’t do either (too 50’s jazz-jism & birth) but ‘cold’ as positive CHILL. Degree zero. Think. Begin again.

The Importance of Being ... invites Wildean earnestness. However, Myles is also going-a-Bunburying: off to Iceland (in the footsteps of Mr W.H.) writing poetry. Each of these essays are excuses to be elsewhere, become-another only to find out who you ‘really’ are all along.

In the absence of an index, I offer my own fingering through the pages – those places where I paused:

On Robert Walser (17) his work’s “permeable borders” and “sudden shifts of mood”. On writers not being “smart” (18). On Iceland where “all languages were other languages”. On having work to do and being thankful for “the focus” (32). On libraries not being too beautiful. On an “ecology of sound” and what English does to languages. On Robert Smithson and what she notes in his work – “the earth is a dot, he wrote” (87). On the “very soul of poetry” being the list (97). On Ted Berrigan and Jimmy Schuyler and Alice Notley and Ann Lauterbach. On How To Write An Avant-Garde Poem and knowing when to let poems alone and windows and her “whirligig mind” and using what you’ve got and learning to bear silence. On Bjork and Bob Dylan and writing when you’re moving and how your mother can spoil a sunset (169). On the sincerity of the touch of a foot in the night (180). On writing by hand and poetry being “an opportunity to change the locks continually” (193). On the difficulty of even having a thought these days. On craft and her studio. On quilts. On giving a month or a day. On clay being “mud’s mouth” (323). On browser art and living in the throat and not being able to do everything and ...

“the impossibility of that choice, of the everything when I was young, that choice made me a poet because I could have some purchase on everything and do a little bit of it all the day. Just chipping away...” (255).