Riddles of Form: Eileen Myles issue

In the circumstances what better to do than post another in the series Riddles of Form? I spent yesterday morning looking at the few poems by Eileen Myles I could track down in anthologies. Here, then, is a reading of ‘New England Wind’ – I’m getting it out of Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry but the poem was originally published in the volume Not Me. At least I think so.

Here’s the first verse:

Remember me this summer
under the eaves again
stretched out against
the sky again
like Orion’s moon

Relatively short lines (not as short, though, I see compared to what she’s using in Sorry, Tree). I notice the soft closing syllables of “remember” and “summer”, written yet hardly spoken, as if already in danger of being forgotten. There’s a visual ‘echo’ of a ‘me’, glimpsed like a figure in long grass playing hide and seek with the reader:

Re/me/mber me this sum/me/r

Such an effect is - I suspect - alien to Myles’ intentions (in interviews she argues for a reading that gets more the onward movement of the phrasing rather than staying on the printed page) but it’s there all the same. More certain – in its uncertainty – is the role of “remember”. Is that an imperative voice – to remember for a future occasion? Or is that the nostalgic voice of reminiscence? I like the way “under” then echoes “summer” as the poem starts to work its own internal sound logics of remembrance. And the long vowel of “eaves” suggesting perhaps the lazy ‘ease’ of elongated hours.

stretched out against
the sky again

It’s “against” that’s the key word here. How it evicts the predictable “below”. “Against” suggests some opposition, defiance even? The lines don’t so much allude to as tempt Eliot’s Prufrock –

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky ...

or Auden’s

Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead

which finishes its first verse with the poet’s feet pointing “to the rising moon”. Such academic truffling feels, though, like a distraction from the ongoing movement of the poem.

I’m more interested in the inner dynamics of Myles’ poem, the “again” – “against” – “again” repetition, closing lines 2, 3 and 4. It’s an effect similar to knocking your head against something hard – a low beam perhaps, the type you’d find up in an attic room. I don’t want to cheapen the poem by such comparisons. Rather to suggest the physicality of Myles’ writing – finding in poetic terms tangible feelings.

As for “Orion's moon” I’m not sure he – or it – has one. A visual reading would notice the rising ‘O’ working typographically (and still a presence in verses 3 and 4). Or is it simply the moon coinciding with the constellation raising, in turn, questions of belonging and possessing that are pertinent to the poem. The moment of perception, too, such vast distances (which are also times) telescoped by Myles’s eye. The human ephemeral set against the stellar eternal.

On to verse two:

When a breeze crawls
down a screen, pip, zing
or is that a cat
crawling up

The act of remembering (repetition) and now another logic to the poem: up/down. Eileen lying down/Eileen looking up. Now a breeze “crawls/down” or it’s “a cat/crawling up”.

Abrasive s/z consonants suggest the scraping and scratching involved. And ‘or’ (to my ear) threads “crawls” ... “or” ... “crawling”. Against this there’s the almost comical drumming effect of “is that a cat”. Originally I typed the line “or is it a cat” only to notice that you’d lose the rat-a-tat-tat rhythm. Comical, too, the “pip, zing” and it’s something I like about Myles’ poems – being unashamed to include such ‘stoopid’ effects (“Mm-err” in ‘Dear Andrea’, “spea/spep/spe” ‘For Jordana’,‘Ooh’ as a title – all in Sorry, Tree). That said, “pip, zing” is pretty damned close to the sound I hear tugging a roller blind on a velux. The catch gives then there’s the quick whip as the blind coils up. Not so stupid at all. And all along we’re shifting ground – is the initial simile carried over from verse one or are we into a new line of thought? Needless to say, this is the kind of fun you get reading Myles’ poems.

Next, the strange verse three.

Oh was I alone in the
first room I ever
had or who would’ve
writ this then? Me too
when I am mad

More indecisions. A first room (a womb, even?) by implication a sense of Self and individuality. It’s hard to keep out Woolf’s famous formulation for the woman writer – a room of one’s own – despite Myles’ hip disregard for such limits. In The Importance of Being Iceland I like the defiant attitude:

It’s a little like the way I think of my own “studio”. Where I do my work. It’s no place and everyplace and it’s made out of language and goes where it goes. ‘The Time of Craft’ (315)

The Self estranged – shown in the weird grammatical warp and what seems to be a sudden interruption by another voice (“Me too/when I am mad”). The effect is complex and suggests the poem/poet has company – rather like a Berrigan sonnet slamming another’s words or lines into his own (who do words belong to anyway?). Or to invite in another poet – Ashbery – it’s that effect of voice tone: the questioning sigh cut by the crazed rejoinder. And what about “writ” – yanking the poem into a different period and register of language. Disorientating and deliberately so.

Verse three:

O leave me alone with
my aching head,
panicky panicky
no where to go
pretty north & silly

From the regret sighful (“Oh”) to the more overtly poetic “O”. The suggestion of a pose? However, it’s a hangover rather than Keatsian weltschmerz. I like the scuttle of the repeated “panicky” (again, again) in contrast to the sorrowful long ‘o’s that resound through lines one and four. But what about “pretty north & silly”? More Icelandic antics? An insider phrase (à la Gertrude Stein) or a Barabara Guest-type gesture all New York quirky? Or are we back in the library with our copy of Hamlet – “I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is / southerly ...”. This for a poem entitled, ‘New England Wind’. Hmmm. And also the deliberation about whether or not to be ... alone. Hmmm again.

Finally, the long closing verse (the anthology breaks at line 9 but I sense it all comes as one).

The other night
under the eaves
in a rain at 4 o’clock
I woke up it was
so sexy; listened so
careful in the world
the next day
for who also heard it
dreamy-eyed, who could’ve
come up or I come down
for once from
the sky
to be what
fell

A sudden access to energy, the core memory, what the other verses have been preliminary to. How a poem can negotiate an opening.

It’s the “remember” of line one with “other” replacing “under”. There are the long ‘o’s of arousal working with the threading long ‘e’s: “eaves” ... “sexy” ... “dreamy”. A palpable erotic excitement, risk, dare, frisson. There’s the possibility of shared aloneness – who, together-apart, heard that rain and might have ...? – and of the miraculous declaring itself in the everyday:

And we, who think of ascending
happiness, then would feel
the emotion that almost startles
when happiness falls.

Rilke, of course, bringing to a close his Tenth Elegy. Did Myles have this in mind? I wonder. The language does. Possibly, too, Guest’s confusions of love’s ups and downs –

Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.

Parachutes? No matter, what counts is Myles’ teasing apart of ‘befell’ in the senses of to fall to, to happen, to occur. Luck, chance, Fate ... embodied in oneself or another. And the rhythm of the last four lines – dwelling in the expansive sounds of “sky” and “be” right as the poem narrows down to deliver: “fell”.

And believe it or not, right at this moment – yesterday – as I was finishing these notes the copy of Sorry, Tree fell through the letter box.

A book may befall, too.