Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles (born December 9, 1949) is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, 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."

The Boston Globe described them as "that rare creature, a rock star of poetry."

Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 9, 1949, to a family with a working-class background.

The dodgems issues featured poems by John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Charles Bernstein, as well as a letter from Lily Tomlin and an angry note from a neighbor; both issues are referenced in the book, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side—Adventures in Writing: 1960–1980, (which also describes St. Mark's), and were exhibited in vitrines in the Library's 1998 show on the same subject.

They 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 they participated in writing workshops held at St. Mark's Poetry Project, which promoted the idea of the "working artist."

There they studied with Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Paul Violi, and Bill Zavatsky, and were given a template for creating art in the context of community.

There, Myles first met the poet Allen Ginsberg, whom they admired and who became the subject of several of their poems and essays.

By their own account, Myles moved from Boston to New York in 1974 "to be a poet," where they became associated with a group of poets at St. Mark's Poetry Project.

In 1977 and 1979, Myles published issues of dodgems, a literary magazine, a title referring, in the vernacular of Great Britain, to bumper cars, specifically those of Revere Beach, MA. The title is said to serve as a metonym for the collision of aesthetic differences that characterized the poetry scene of that time.

Myles's first book, The Irony of the Leash, was published by Jim Brodey from the St. Mark's Poetry Project in 1978.

In 1979 they worked as an assistant to the poet James Schuyler.

During Reagan's presidency, 1981–1988, Myles dealt with the cuts to the NEA art budget and focused their energies on broadening the aesthetic and cultural range of the St. Mark's Poetry Project.

Myles' 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 their tenure at St. Mark's, Myles performed their now well-known poem "An American Poem" for the first time at P.S. 122.

Myles's next collection, A Fresh Young Voice From the Plains (1981), earned their first major review, by Jane Bosveld in Ms. Not Me (1991) is Myles's most popular collection of poetry.

It contains Myles work, "An American Poem," in which they fictionalize their identity and claims to be a "Kennedy", and comfortably addresses politics in the work.

They first performed the work at P.S. 122 in New York City, during their tenure at St. Mark's. Since then "An American Poem" has been filmed and shown in film festivals all over the world, screening in New York and other major cities.

It has been included, in translation, in German, Russian, and Italian anthologies of American writing.

In 1984 Myles was hired as the artistic director of St. Mark's Poetry Project, and held that position until 1986.

They have stated their time there gave them the opportunity to rethink the institution that influenced their early work.

At the beginning of the 1991–1992 presidential election, Myles heard George H. W. Bush speak about the threat to freedom of speech posed by the dialog of activists and minoritized people.

With that statement, Myles "realized there was this amazing political power to speech."

Myles then conducted an "openly female" write-in campaign for the office of President of the United States from the East Village that spiraled into a project of national interest.

Part performance art, part protest, this gesture was meant to offer an alternative glimpse into what progressive, radical, and socially committed politics could look like.

Zoe Leonard's 1992 poem, "I want a president", which begins with the line: "I want a dyke for president", was written to celebrate Myles's presidential run.

Myles produced Maxfield Parrish/early and new poems (1995), a collection of both new and selected poems on the theme of the surreality of sex.

Beginning in 2002, Myles began a five-year stint as a professor of writing at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Since leaving UCSD in 2007, Myles has been a Visiting Writer at Bard College, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Montana-Missoula, Columbia University School of the Arts, and New York University.

UCSD funded the research and travel grant that enabled the creation of Inferno (2010), as well as Hell, an opera composed by Michael Webster, for which Myles wrote the libretto.

The trajectory of "An American Poem" is documented in Myles's novel Inferno (2010).

In 2012, Myles received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow (a memoir), which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life.

Myles uses they/them pronouns.

In 2016, Myles endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in a BuzzFeed piece entitled Hillary Clinton: The Leader You Want When The World Ends.

Myles was also approached by Clinton's campaign to write a poem, as part of "Artists for Hillary", a mostly-female group which included Jenny Holzer and Maya Lin, whose creative statements were testament to their support for Clinton's presidential bid.

Myles's poem was entitled MOMENTUM 2016.