Last Wednesday, I had the chance to see Eileen Myles read with Hoa Nguyen in Austin. Both are poets whose work stands out as part of an avant-garde that the poetry world is slowly, but surely, losing.
I first encountered Myles’s work about five years ago at a summer writing program in Boulder. Even then, fresh from undergraduate studies, when I heard her read, her words struck a desire in me to create, to live and become completely absorbed into an avant-garde writer’s world. It was one of those moments I think best exists in my head. Picture the scene from Trainspotting when Renton shoots heroin and is, quite literally, swallowed by the floor, sinking deeper and deeper into that other place, and you’ve got a good idea of what Myles’s poetry does to me. That other place I keep falling further and further into is the avant-garde, which always leaves me clamoring for more.
While I’ve only recently discovered Nguyen’s poetry, her writing, as with Myles’s, takes me to a place where I am able to rediscover the excitement, and, sometimes, insanity, of voice in poetry. Nguyen read from her 2009 publication, Hecate Lochia, along with poems from a new manuscript.
One of my favorite poems in Hecate Lochia, and one that she happened to read, is ever so subtly titled, “Write Fucked Up Poems”:
…fucked up poem round or layered
You know cabbaged and I will egg you
Full Moon Spring Equinox…A fucked up poem from the start…
What I love about voice in Hecate Lochia is how Nguyen is able to blur the boundaries of the place poetry is supposed to take-political or not, personal or not-and all the while, leads her reader through what seems an unfolding, and albeit “fucked-up,” landscape in form, emotion, and expectation.
Myles’s landscape in her 2010 publication, Inferno (A Poet’s Novel), also blurs the boundaries of place-but this time between the boundaries of poetry and prose.
Myles’s Inferno is a take on Dante’s, only this take includes that of Myles’s own experiences, from Boston to early 1970s New York. While I have yet to read this new book in its entirety, by page sixty-five, I quite literally choked on the gut-punching reality of what a poet’s place and life is. Myles writes:
We who write poetry and think about it all the time—who walk the streets that other humans walk, past pizza stands and trees, are citizens meanwhile of a secret country with its own currency that gets exchanged anecdotally, even whispered in the loud thrumming silence of the day, in the galleries the Marxist auditoriums jammed bookstores…the stinking bars where poets meet and read in. In the dozens even hundreds of stained and damp diaries the evidence accumulates…The poet’s life is just so much crenellated waste….
Waste. And fuck-upedness. All of which we collect at the site of poetry. But this is the place that I think inspires many of us to keep writing. Check out Myles’s and Nguyen’s latest books, stat, and join me in my latest fall into the avant-garde.
Caitlin McCrory, Poetry Editor