Jump in, Dry off and Walk on

Eileen Myles in an interview says:

The little living human is framed, continually, by opposites. One of the ways we experience this is in the living realm is in the limitations of things.  Can we accept this longing, feel it, even maybe occasionally go down to the beach. Jump in, dry off and walk on. Do we accept our fate?

Yes... to walk on! 

"The only baggage you can bring
Is all that you can't leave behind
And if the darkness is to keep us apart
And if the daylight feels like it's a long way off
And if your glass heart should crack
And for a second you turn back
Oh no, be strong
Walk on, walk on" 

 

 

Reify your life

An excerpt from an interview with Eileen Myles:

Rumpus: Right. That also ties into an anxiety people have about being a “poet.” It can be an identity or profession or it can just be another state.
Myles: If you throw out the vocation word, or the occupation word, it’s like, how are you occupying your time? I mean in your existence, because that’s the place where you write the poems. You don’t write them outside of your existence, you write them inside. So everything that’s there is available. It’s like, I don’t know why I always think of the word guy—in German, there’s a word der bub, and it just means the guy. When I think about epics like Beowulf and The Odyssey, all those long-form poems, they’re basically just the adventures of this guy. If we enter that with gender in mind, which as women we must, and empty it and claim it and occupy it however we choose, you’re just this person. The whole history of poetry and sagas and narration are just the tales of people. Recently I was talking to Fanny Howe about War and Peace, and she was talking about how great it is, but she was like ugh but I hate the war parts. What I find very interesting about the war parts is they’re just about people messing up. It’s about how empty the occupation of war is. It’s not these great noble thoughts and deeds and acts of bravery, though those things do happen as well as when they occur domestically. But war is mostly just these spaced out dudes prancing around on their horses without a clue as to what they’re doing, while other people go look how noble he is. But nobody really knows what war is. Because in a way there is no such thing, and there’s no such thing as history, or any of it, except for how we’re spending our moments in this sort of infinitude we call living. To capture that as poetry, and to call that your occupation, is to sort of reify your life.

I've been reading Eileen Myles poetry and about her only in the last couple years. If you don't know much about her, New York Times magazine had a good profile about her in 2016, when she seemed to be everywhere. 

(Photograph from wikipedia: Eileen Myles at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival)

Also, if interested, you can follow her on Instagram or Twitter.

Blazing forth and muddling through

Philip Roth may have stopped writing but he sure can write well still. Read the interview in the New York Times (January 16, 2018) in its entirety but for here, this excerpt:

Looking back, how do you recall your 50-plus years as a writer?
Philip Roth: Exhilaration and groaning. Frustration and freedom. Inspiration and uncertainty. Abundance and emptiness. Blazing forth and muddling through. The day-by-day repertoire of oscillating dualities that any talent withstands — and tremendous solitude, too. And the silence: 50 years in a room silent as the bottom of a pool, eking out, when all went well, my minimum daily allowance of usable prose.

To dwell in the heads of vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities

Interview of the week - I have not read Wolf Hall, the much raved about novel by Hilary Mantel, which won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2009.  It is the first of a planned trilogy of novels charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the powerful minister in the court of King Henry VIII. So, I barely even noticed last year that the  2nd book in the series, Bring Up the Bodies, came and was equally raved about and once again the winner of the Man Booker Prize for 2012!. 

But last night I ran into this interview with Hilary Mantel in the New York Times and really loved it!

The surprising (to me) bit was the answer to the question: What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves? The Answer:

"Stacks of books on cricket. I am fascinated by its history. It’s a story told in match statistics, but it’s also bred some stylish prose. My head is full of the ghosts of men in white playing games that were over before the Great War. "

And the best line in the interview was unarguably this one: 

"I don’t like overrefinement, or to dwell in the heads of vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities."