Tiny Gesture: a Conversation with Eileen Myles
by edy guy at Buckman Publishing
also PUBLISHED on the This is portland substack
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. Bird Watching, an archival collection of four early works, will be published by Fonograf Editions in 2026. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.
I asked Eileen Myles to talk with me in June of 2025 during Lit Fest in Denver, Colorado. (I didn’t even know what Lit Fest was, they wrote back, I didn’t know that was its name.)
At the festival I took their seminar titled “10 Photos and a Dog.” When they walked in, I noticed straightaway that Eileen had rolled their jeans into capris—a stylistic mark I’ve come to associate with them.
The seminar centered the word ecceity (or haecceity), a term from medieval philosophy that roughly translates to this-ness—in this case, the this-ness of photographs. Among others, two self-portraits were shared as examples.
One was a photo of a photo Eileen had taken from the toilet: a younger Eileen framed and hanging on the wall to the left of a browned banana peel slung over the sink’s edge. The other was a photograph of Eileen on the toilet. At the time, they had been teaching in Missoula, where a “homophobic non-fiction writer” had scorned them for having a younger girlfriend who, Eileen contests, was “deeply into her twenties.” In response, Eileen and the girlfriend staged a portrait juxtaposing Middle-Aged Men in Academia—“smoking a cigarette in their office, drinking whiskey, and dying,” as Eileen put it. The resulting photo is all glory and gayness, meant in total opposition.
In their teaching, the frame of a photograph is conceptual by nature. What’s held in and out of capture influences equally. Both impact the static image. So to post it, or to chew it over in a room of writers, is to “see it socially.” The writer’s role in all of this is to act as captioner, adding language to what informed the framing.
Eileen’s method is altruistic. Their relationship to art and image production and circulation is both composed and unselfconscious: they make things and they give them away. The poem is the poem—already right, already finished in its original form.
Embedded in their work is an invitation to sociality—an invitation easy to accept when paired with the ecceity of Eileen, an essence that exists in the realm of feeling, as witnessed in the this-ness their self-portraits epitomize. More or less, meaning cannot be imposed; Eileen makes a thing that is itself.
After the seminar, we took an Uber to their hotel where we had a conversation in the lobby. As a generous and professional associationist, Myles had a notable response for every question. We talked about archiving then and now, writing schools (ad infinitum), Alice Notley, fathers and imperialism, and last, but not least, sex and chakras.
(This conversation was edited for clarity and readability.)
Buckman Publishing: What's your take on print versus digital?
Eileen Myles: Oh, I mean, I realized that I've really started to lose track of where I'm publishing for the past ten years because it used to always be that you just pile up your journals or whatever, and I can keep track of where I've been and there was a record.
Now, I feel like there's starting to be a real lack of a record, unless you're really diligent about putting everything on your CV. I kind of don't even know where I'm publishing—for poems especially.
For you especially. And as we're thinking about people passing away, this honing together an archive, what is that going to look like when your work is all over the place? It's going to be quite a task.
I know, yeah, I know, it's weird.
I think a lot of times your writing is regarded as being self-referential, really involved with the “I,” but I was listening to you and Maggie Nelson talk about how you're negotiating that “I” within the conditions of what you're observing.
When I read your work, it's a hyper-observation of the now, of the moment. So there's this relationship between the “I,” but also a dynamism between when you use the “I” and when you're not using the “I.”
Right, right.
I'm really interested in how your relationship with language is being affected right now, given that there is so much political turmoil going on. I think you're a writer that is really immersed with the political and the personal at once. I'm interested in what the affect on your language is.
On my language?
How it's moving through your body, how it's moving through your mind.
I just feel the political is something, obviously this is with us. I mean it's just—it's our condition. You know, I mean I think that... it's not a separate sphere. But I think we're living in a really alarming time.
I think there's probably no part of my life that won't be radically affected by some of the things that are happening in this country. And some of the things that this country is wreaking on the world, you know, specifically Gaza, for sure. And so it just winds up being, it's just like this kind of interesting offness about it, because I feel like I want my writing to reflect what I'm thinking and feeling and how it's affecting me, and yet I still kind of look at myself as a, relatively speaking, bourgeois American in that I've gotten myself to a place where I'm kind of comfortable. And so it's like, where do I put that information? So it's really become a big question in my writing and my poetry.
Sometimes it's something like Buddhism and a meditation practice, which I have, really helps because one of the structures of meditating is the way that it invites you to notice what you're thinking of when you're meditating. When you're supposedly not thinking, notice what you're thinking of and label it, you know. And so I found myself often having, I notice I'm thinking about Palestine, would just kind of come into poems in a very automatic way.
And just really, witnessing my existence seems like a more political thing because I just do my regular bullshit and then I look at my phone and there's completely shocking, horrifying information on it. And shuttling through those two spheres in a poem becomes a practice in itself. And yet, still, I'm an artist and I want my work to be new, so I'm always kind of looking for new ways to cite my exclamation.
So it's an immediate reaction? If you have the thought it's going to go into language on a page?
Ultimately, eventually, occasionally, intermittently, yeah. I mean I feel like I vacillate between that awareness and just my own cozy fraught state.
But the Buddhism component is the engagement with the thought and also like a stripping away of the language of the thought because you're thinking without thinking. That's just fascinating—a way in which to engage with what we see on our phones without being fully mediated.
I think I ask this question because I can sometimes feel like my ability for language is obliterated with the onslaught of stimulus of the news and the things that we're seeing.
I mean, I'm a first-person writer to a great extent, but it's not a first-person world.
Right. And with the first person—what's your relationship there? Often it’s perceived as “you.”
Yeah, and often it is, but I don't feel like, I think it's just people. People talk about taking pictures and is it handheld or is it on a tripod? You know, and sometimes I think the difference between first person and third person is that simple. You know, it's sort of like, I like the unsteady eye gaze, but what is Eileen Myles? The thing that's always weird is if that isn't interrogated. In a Buddhist way, it's just like, that's the question—what is it? I didn't give myself this name, I didn't request this existence to begin. I just happen to be here, in a way. So there's something that's so impersonal about the personal, too. So it's just like I think the first person continues to seem sturdy to me, you know, as a perspective.
And you know, and plenty of times, sure, I think there's an “I” in my work that definitely isn't me. But lots of times it is, but I just don't think that it still is only a way to look at something else, I think.
It also reminds me—you talked a lot about this in the seminar, which I was excited about—of the performative element of the language.
I was reading, I think it was your interview in The Believer… what really provoked me was that you had been edited out of your question marks and you had said that that was messing with the score, you know, and it's really not your intention to be blatantly asking a question or using that punctuation. And of course they kept in the periods instead of the question marks.
I was just thinking about the element of performativity and how your scores work. Is it a response to the line, like line by line are you orchestrating your score? Or is it that you are setting out for a tonal quality?
Oh, I think tonal because I think lines are artificial in a way. I think they're just managing pace and speed. I mean they're technical in that way, but you know they're just moving.
So the performance is in the moment.
The performance is each line, yeah. Because this is so big. At any moment, existence is so huge, so I think it's such a tiny gesture to be writing a poem. But it's sort of like, and yet, I have hundreds of these, hundreds and hundreds. [Referencing a notebook Myles has with them where poems are written.] It's what I do all the time.
It's like I'll be in the movie theater like [gestures as if they’re writing in the notebook].
I’m thinking about transcribing the reprint that’s coming out with Fonograf, A Fresh Young Voice From the Plains. When doing it, I was like space bar, space bar, space bar, space… it wasn't just like oh, perhaps there's an indentation here perhaps there's a line here.
You were transcribing it?
Yeah, we had to put it into a new Microsoft Word document from wherever it was printed last.
Yeah, yeah.
For the reprint.
But I mean, we, so you, but you said you did it?
Yes, I transcribed it for Fonograf.
Oh my God.
Did we know this?
I think I said this to you in the email, but...
I think I didn't quite take it in.
That's amazing.
I think that's what made me think of the performance and the score so much because it was... it wasn't a consistent pattern. It wasn't like you were replicating something over and over. There was an inconsistent propulsion per poem that required you to have different spacing. And I was very curious about that. I was like, at this time was Eileen writing on a typewriter, you know? And that would mean that you were also space bar, space bar, space bar…
Either by hand, you know, with a pen, or on a manual typewriter, absolutely. Plus, I was a young poet. I was new. And so, I was still changing what poems would look like a lot. You know, now they almost always simply look like this. [References notebook again.]
Even in A Fresh Young Voice From the Plains, that’s the exciting thing about the book is that it's publishing this long poem that nobody's seen. I read it one night at St. Mark's in 1980, you know, so that's really fun.
There was the manual typewriter on my desk, and I would write a couple of lines and then walk away for a few days and just like the poem just stayed there all summer and so it was just like, it was very whimsical where the carriage would stop on the page. And yet, then 50 years later, or 45 years later, I want it to be exact.
It's really funny, but it's true because that's the poem I wrote. It may have been instinctual or whimsical, but we want that to be totally reproduced. So it's really funny, those two things meeting each other.
Why do you think that you've shifted to more simple line breaks?
Well just because, it's like there's no reason why you would in a notebook, mostly, I wouldn't bother to you know—why would you be doing all that thinking? It's not the nature of the instrument.
But if you were to transcribe it to a digital format, would you keep that form?
Which “it”?
The way you had written it in that notebook right there.
If I was transcribing it?
If you put it onto a Microsoft Word document for potential publication, or if someone wanted to publish this poem of yours, would you keep that form?
The one it has?
Yes.
Yeah! Cause what else would it be?
I think, well, there can be an editing or a refinement process that might move those things around, but I'm probably of a similar camp that that is the origin.
Yeah, this is the thing. So it's sort of like that would be like, it would mean something else. I mean, it used to be, when I was less known, if somebody got a poem with long skinny lines of mine, they might put it in three columns on a page.
And I was like, that's really…I mean, I was usually more interested in being published than fighting that, but it was really different. It wasn't what I meant.
So usually now, there's a few things. People invariably won't let me use the word cause. I don't spell C-O-S and I don't use the apostrophe C-A-U. I just do C-A-U-S-E. I think since I was in my 20s, I thought, why is this not just simply a new word? How long are we gonna hang on to this apostrophe?
It always feels like a little kid going, "cuz," when we just all say “cause.” It is just a contraction that people do conversationally in print. I can't tell you how many times I use it, and then they fix it. Even when I say don't fix those. You know, they can't. Somebody along the line will say oh!
The editing impulse is like...almost tyrannical.
Yeah, they’re like this is the way, this is correct.
Do you still not fight it or do you fight it?
Oh, I fight it. I fight it. Yeah but it's just like, I think everybody has agreed, so I'm safe, and then at the last minute some part I didn't I mean. It happens all the time, it's crazy.
The last proof…
Yeah, I feel like a crazy person.
I remember transcribing that very very very long poem of yours in A Fresh Young Voice From the Plains as well, and I'm thinking now about Alice Notley's work—that is someone I wanted to talk with you about. The poem Blinding the White Horse in Front of Me has been significant in my life and that is kind of an epic poem. Read out loud I think it's like 20ish minutes. And then, of course, on the page, you know, however long it takes you to read that poem. But, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, these people passing away…did you have any overlap with them?
I mean, they were both people who had deep personal relationships with, you know, different kinds, but I was close to Alice since 1975. And a member of the family, practically, when Ted was alive and Anselm and Eddie were kids, I just had an open invitation to dinner, so I just like was…
There.
Yeah, yeah. We were in the neighborhood and there was a way in which poets lived then. We were all loaning money to each other and sharing drugs and books and everything. I mean I was in Alice's workshop and Ted would do these kinds of workshops where he would kind of hold forth. So I knew Alice first as kind of a young fan but then when you did a magazine—I did a magazine then—and when you did a magazine one I did a magazine then, and when you did a magazine, one of the things you would do was you would just go to their house, and they would open the manuscript of new poems, and you would pick one for your magazine. You know what I mean?
Whoa, like shopping for a poem?
Yeah, here, take a look, that's what I've got.
Your portfolio was literal, tangible.
Yeah, so I went over to their house for that, and that was just the beginning of our friendship. And it was funny, because Alice always was like, you weren't my student.
Well, you're close in age, aren't you?
Five years.
But that's, you know, five years, generations of poets are different. In five years you could be, like Alice was already teaching—she was 30—at St. Mark's. She was teaching at St. Mark's and I was, you know, it was my former graduate school and I had just come to the city. I didn't know any poets. You know what I mean? Like, she had been on the scene. I mean, she went to Iowa so it's just like, again, Anne Waldman, same thing, was five years older than me but Anne grew up in New York, so she was going to readings when she was 18. We’re only talking about six years—I came to New York when I was 24. Six years. But when you're that young too those are big years.
Patti Smith was a teenager in New York, she was from New Jersey. You know, totally different. You know, those people. So it's like five years becomes ten years, but it feels like another generation because it always was: When did you come to New York?
I'm thinking now of you and Maggie Nelson, you know, and that's a more significant time difference. You wouldn't be in the same school of writing, would you?
No, we're in the same world of writing, I think. You know, and she was in my workshops a lot when I was doing that. But I feel, I mean, I suppose we're friends and peers at this moment.
The distinction of writing schools nowadays is way more elusive to me, but maybe it’s just I can look back and see how people were defining things historically. But now, do we have the New York School of poets? What are the poets today?
The New York School is so funny because people really… Alice loves to say I’m not in the New York School. People love to say she was second-generation, but for a very long time it was like Alice was not second-generation, she was later. Cause it was clear who people were. It was John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, those were the first ones and then people that were their students were the next ones and Alice was after that.
First of all, it’s silly, cutting it all up. It just all becomes an unconsidered second-generation New York School now. It just means anyone after Frank O’Hara. I think it just means anybody after Frank O'Hara, but see again, Alice would say, but I'm not. For some people, it's really important to them to say I'm not New York School. I don’t claim to be any more than I claim to be a language poet, which—nobody would say I'm a language poet, but the way I always feel is I'm not not a language poet. Those people are my peers who are reading all the same things, going to all the same readings. It's just that there was a bit of a club and I wasn't in that club, but they were my friends. There was different interests within the group.
I see.
And those were important to people.
Alice talked a lot about how it was like a boys’ club. No one had been doing what she was doing. And she had this huge archive because she believed that she was a first of her kind.
And I wonder if some of that resistance and the nuance, the differences between what people are doing, is to stand outside the boys’ club and to shine a light on faults in that.
But also just repurposing. I mean, I think that's something that Alice does and that I do. It's sort of like, certainly, totally influenced by these guys, and I’m close friends with many of them. And just taking that and repurposing it.
Like I don't need to ever say that I'm this or that. The brandings often seem sort of exclusive. Excluding people in ways. I'm more aware of that than my desire to be included, ya know?
Like somebody who considered themselves a language poet would introduce me in a reading and say, Eileen is a New York School poet. And that's how it would be. And so I have no need to say I'm not that. I just notice the phenomena and how it operates. Whereas I think for some reason Alice, it was important for her to not be that, even though everybody will say that she's that.
So I was like, who cares? Gotta let them say what they say. But it was different. She felt differently.
And there are deep personal meanings in those distinctions for us.
But I think, one of the things I do think is that all these styles, whether it's New York School or Black Mountain or all these poetry styles that I read as a young person, I feel like I have definitely brought them to a kind of queer scene. Ya know what I mean? Like people like Michelle Tea and that whole world. They were younger than me. They were 20 years younger than me and they were influenced and affected. And even Maggie, I feel like I'm an importer of those influences to these people.
And so in a way you're pointing out the enmeshment that everyone is influencing each other or carrying on various lineages.
And also by the time there were like 1,600 or 2,000 or how many writing MFA programs in America and everybody is stirring the pot. And so all those schools, like how anything is taught and shared. I mean there's a difference in how people talk about things for sure, but it's all mixed up now.
That's good, but you can kind of, but you can kind of tell who is influenced by what and what, ya know, I mean like, there's, there's distinctions in the work, ya know, and how you learn to write and what you learn to write on.
Like there's people like, like somebody like Louise Glück is not important to me. I have never read—actually I've read one book of hers and that was because I was a judge for the National Book Award, so I had to read that book. And I didn't think she should have won, ya know.
Why is that?
Well it just wasn't a great book. I mean she won because all the other judges were like Louise.
She already had acclaim at this point?
Well they were like, Louise has never gotten a National Book Award.
So it’s time.
Yeah, and it was just like so what? So what? Fred but Fred Moten has never and Fanny Howe has never and these are ya know. I mean, it was such a politic to it. So there's so many people in the poetry world that it's like I'm friendly with them, but their work is not important to me. And look at who gets National Book Awards, and ya know, it's sort of like who gets Pulitzer Prizes. I mean, it's really, it's not, ya know, it's wonderful when it's Alice Notley or Rae Armantrout or something.
It's like looking at the work for its materiality and I think we have gotten to a hyper-referential and political state in publishing where it's like, who is this person? How long have they been doing it? Is it about time that they get this recognition?
Well, the awards are really weird. They're almost like marketing devices, sort of like, just the way people are introduced and all their awards.
Oh, I work in publicity, so I'm like so familiar, you know—you pay for some of these awards. It's a marketplace and so therefore there's corruption by capitalism steeped into it, and then we can go into what the author is paid and that's a whole conversation in itself.
This is completely shifting in focus…
Yeah, we don't care, we actually don't care about any of that…
I was thinking about how we're coming up on Father's Day and I was reading Ariana Reines’ book, Wave of Blood. Have you read that book?
Yeah.
I was so interested in the relationship between her and her father and how that inflicted into her political relationships.
Me and her father?
No, her. Her and her father.
There’s a focus in the book of this absent, or not loving necessarily, relationship with her own father and how that has really influenced her relationship with lovability, but this is also steeped in how she’s processing what's going on in Gaza and the violence that is also tied to homogeneous patriarchy and imperial power. As you're reading it you're correlating imperial power with this relationship with the father, or at least I was in my reading, and I was fascinated by this.
I'm interested in what you think about that, but then also, many, many years after losing your own father, how that relationship is playing out in your writing.
Well, I think my relationship with my father, I mean, my father was an alcoholic, but he was really great and really very generous. I had a really different relationship to my father than Ariana. It was weird and obsessive, but I had a very loving generous father that saw me in his way, ya know. And so I think it's funny… I don't know if it's so much about my work, but in therapy I have male therapists, always. Very little good experience of female therapists. And I think in the writing world, I anticipate men as being supportive of me. Not so much that I don't expect women to support me, but. So I don't know that I have such a hard time with the fathers. And I think my father would have been very supportive of my queerness and all of that. I mean, he was pretty queer himself. So really very different.
I mean, I love thinking about Ariana's relationship with her father. Well, being Jewish, it's sort of like having that kind of afflicted relationship with your father makes you not be as weighed down with the burden of Judaism as a patriarchal structure. You know, it's interesting.
Those were things that I think I could spend a lifetime thinking about.
But interestingly, Arianna is my father. That's our joke, is that I call her dad because she was born on the day my father died.
Oh, wow.
Not the same year, of course. But it's really funny when we discovered that. It was kind of ridiculous. I call her dad. It's one of our friendship markers. Very weird.
That is strangely serendipitous. I assumed you were in cahoots, but I didn’t know to that degree.
Right, right, right. I think what she discovered was that her family immigrated to America on the day that, on her birthday, maybe?
Right, that's in the book.
Yeah, so that day, October 24th, keeps coming up. I love things like that. I'm all for numerology.
Right, there's too much correlation for it to be random.
It's fun, it's haunting.
Absolutely.
I really believe there is this white patriarchal correlation that is, of course, inherent to imperialism and the violence that we see.
I found her book to be really guiding and clarifying in making that correlation a lot more than other works I had read. And I think some people sometimes can critique that conflation, like the personal should not be implicated in that way, but I severely disagree with that. I think that it was a way in which you can draw the web. And she was drawing the web and showing us how.
I don't even see how that is personal.
Just her relationship with her father.
Oh, right, right, right.
It's in the same way that so many queers have said that being gay or trans or what meant they were driven out of their family and that was the best thing that could have ever happened to them. So I think that for Ariana to have an afflicted relationship with her father maybe it was a personal sadness, but also just a total freedom. To get any woman to figure out how to get out from underneath that.
Does your father come through your writing still today?
He was just a great inspiration, just a foster of its existence. I mean, I knew my father wanted to be a writer. There's no evidence to support that he had any talent or even did anything, ya know. But it was his, somehow, it was a dream of his. And I think that in some ways, my valuing of writing and literature was in response to that. That that was a good thing, that was an important thing, that it would be very respected. I mean, I love that I'm a writer, and my dad would have loved it.
I want to ask you one more question, if you have time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This one's a bit weird.
I was watching an interview with you and Constance Debré. I think you were in Paris and there was a translator, so there was a glitch between your responses and their responses. I was laughing at this performance of translation, which is a side note.
Sex and fucking is an element of the narrative part of their work that I am interested in in regards to this part of the body that produces writing.
Part of the body that produces writing? You're thinking of sex as that or?
If we look at something like chakras…a life-force center would be the sacral chakra.
Oh, oh. Interesting, okay.
I'm just interested in how you think about the relationship between sex, fucking, and writing, beyond a thematic consideration.
Sex makes you want to write. There's no two ways about it. In periods where I'm not involved with anybody or I'm not fucking... I feel like I'm fine and I think that's definitely one of the differences of aging is you don't have the same jones, like I gotta get laid, ya know what I mean? It's like it goes to different places, it comes from different places, it's still important, but it's different.
Like when I was younger I would say it was the most important thing in my life. Just it was. And I don’t think that now, but I will say even this Spring my narrative was puppy and then, puppy changed things, puppy made me start writing poems in a different way. That’s interesting. And then soon after, my work just seemed to change. It seemed like I knew in a clearer way what a poem was again.
There’s this thing I’ve written about that is the bhav. Like the Bhakti Yogi, the person that comes into the room and moves the bhav up and down.
The bhav?
B-h-a-v. It’s sort of like about the quality of the room when there are people there. And and the Bhakti, B-h-a-k-t-i, Yogi comes into the room and moves the bhav up and down. That’s what they want to do through singing and storytelling. It’s so weird because it’s exactly what we do. It’s exactly what I just did for an hour with those people. And so I just think that a life has a bhav. And certain ones are more productive for work and writing and I think sex and love and intense relationship just makes it more charged.
Ya know, I like writing because it’s work I love to do. It’s not work to want to do it or be there. Sexuality just always changes it. And makes it a more charged process.
I have that experience. You have this line too—which got me thinking about it—in A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains, “I didn’t start fucking till quite late. / Exciting, romantic, / I am quite sure it is the one / thing I have invented.” And this idea of inventing correlated with fucking with sexuality—it’s all right there!
Right, right. I mean I think most of us are the same person all our lives in some ways. You make radical changes, but then you’re that person in this new guise, but you’re still that person.
Right, and then the relationship with another… what is that doing?
I know, I know. It’s a question! Is it an interruption? Is it an enhancement? Ya know? It’s always a different thing.
Do you have other practices? Do you do yoga?
Yeah, I do yoga, I meditate, and I go to the gym.
Any kundalini?
No, no, though I’ve often thought I would like that.
In kundalini—I’m not, for the record, a master by any means, but—there is a practice of rising the sexual serpent from the lowest chakra to the crown of the head as a way in which to ignite the higher chakras of imagination, to spiral energy through the body. Often people are wearing hats to reground that energy back down and so, again, I’m not an expert, but I do find it interesting.
Hats? Hats are sending the energy down?
Yeah, so that your prana isn’t exiting out too far beyond your head and you like float away…but, anyway… thank you so much. This was fantastic. I did have a few other questions, but I feel like we answered the questions that were the juiciest.
Okay, good, great.
