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Late in the 1990’s Eileen Myles began living for a serious amount of time in Provincetown. The open sky and endlessness of the landscape was overwhelming, becoming a source of inspiration for her and this new book of poems. In 1999 Ms. Myles was the Schoolhouse Center’s Artist in Residence. During this time she worked on some of the poems in this book. Actually, some were also written flying in Cape Air planes to and from Provincetown. For part of her residency at the Center she curated a panel discussion called “The Sky’s The Limit” which is repeated as the first and last chapter of “SKIES”. Here Jack Pierson, Helen Miranda Wilson, Frances Richard, Molly Benjamin, and John Kelly came to Schoolhouse talked about the sky. The book’s cover reprints Schoolhouse artist Doug Padgett’s painting of a beachball tossed into a blue sky, which hung on the wall behind the panel. With this book Ms. Myles has created and acknowledged a moment in Provincetown. Wonderfully, a Cape summer and places like the Schoolhouse Center can provide these opportunities to gather around an idea, a love affair, an art opening, an animated dinner, a walk to the beach, or anything made as time comes and goes. SKIES galvanizes a moment under the Provincetown sky in a way that is breathtaking and smart. Passion, candor, openness, energy, generosity, velocity, and lift lace the bracingly warm, direct new verses of Eileen Myles’ Skies, American poetry’s unanswerable equal-time message in the teeth of an endarkened political administration. Myles greets us with a characteristically stirring flurry of truth in “Inauguration Day”: …America! Eileen Myles has been called "the last of the New York School poets," the seal on a lineage that began with the personalized, speech-based poetry of Frank O'Hara. Her writing also has roots in the visionary, intensely political work of the Beats. Now 50, she is a cult figure to a generation of young, post-punk female writer-performers who are creating a niche for poetry in the better- known world of pop music and, in the process, forming a new literary avant-garde. She teaches, reads and performs. And she writes about art for The Village Voice and Art in America. A few years ago she toured the country in a minivan with the all-female "word band,"Sister Spit”, performing in bars and galleries and on college campuses. Ms. Myles is a quick, free-ranging talker. Her speech, like her writing, is peppered with sudden shifts in direction and dazzlingly phrased ideas. Her delivery retains the flattened A of her native Boston, and her recently published her first novel, a picaresque, unsentimentally heartbreaking roman à clef titled "Cool for You” released by Soft Skull Press, is a barely fictionalized account of her early years there. Ms. Myles left Massachusetts for New York in 1974. She discovered the St. Marks Poetry Project in the East Village and showed up there for workshops and readings almost every night for 10 years. "It was dedicated to the idea of the working artist," she said. "You could just walk in, sit down and take a class. It was all free." She became its director, briefly, in the 1980's, and she still reads there regularly. She made friends, among them Allen Ginsberg, her role model as an activist-poet. And like many "indie" writers, she scrambled to make a living. Art criticism brought in a little cash. She worked briefly as a caretaker for the poet James Schuyler, an influential New York School link. She took adjunct teaching gigs at colleges but more often held classes privately, finding students through word of mouth or by posting fliers. Eileen Myles currently lives in New York and Provincetown. She travels frequently, teaching, reading, and speaking on art and politics.
SKIES is for sale at The Schoolhouse Center for $16.50.
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