Eileen Myles
| Eileen Myles | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
December 9, 1949 Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation | writer, poet, performer |
| Genre |
poetry non-fiction fiction performance |
| Website | |
| eileenmyles |
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Eileen Myles (born December 9, 1949) is an American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." In 2012 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow (a memoir), which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life.
Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 9, 1949, to a family with a working-class background. She attended Catholic schools in Arlington, Massachusetts, and graduated from UMass Boston in 1971.
Myles moved to New York City in 1974 with the intention of becoming a poet. In New York she participated in writing workshops held at St. Mark's Poetry Project, which promoted the idea of the "working artist," a pragmatic notion that Myles found appealing given her background; there she studied with Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Paul Violi, and Bill Zavatsky, and was given a template for creating art in the context of an urban community. There, Myles first met the poet Allen Ginsberg, whom she admired and who became the subject of several of her poems and essays. In 1979 she worked as an assistant to the poet James Schuyler.
In 1984 Myles was hired as the artistic director of St. Mark's Poetry Project, which, she has stated, gave her the opportunity to rethink the institution that influenced her early work. In this period, Myles dealt with the cuts to the NEA art budget occurring during the Reagan years; Myles' energies focused on broadening the aesthetic and cultural range of the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Her leadership of the Project represented a generational shift away from the church’s base, which until then been run by the second generation members of the New York School. Program Coordinators in this period were Patricia Spears Jones, and Jessica Hagedorn, and Myles invited Alice Notley and Dennis Cooper to teach. Charles Bernstein ran the lecture series, Chris Kraus, Marc Nasdor, and Richard Elovich coordinated performance, Tim Dlugos and James Ruggia edited the Newsletter. During her tenure at St. Mark's, Myles performed "An American Poem" for the first time at P.S. 122.
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