Myles, Eileen

Myles, Eileen (c) Dirk Skiba

Eileen Myles, born 1949 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lives in New York City and Marfa, Texas, is a writer and arts journalist – and a star of contemporary American poetry. Myles’ path as a poet began in New York in the 1970s, they studied at St. Mark’s Poetry Project and later took over its direction. Myles has since published over twenty books, mostly poetry but also novels and essays, and received numerous awards. Publications include the poetry collections “Evolution” (Grove Press 2018) and “I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014” (Harper Collins, 2016). The essay collection “Zur Zeit” on the social, political and aesthetic conditions of writing will be published by Matthes &Seitz in March 2023.

Festival Content

WRITING IDENTITIES

You Are Dazzled By Their Murmurations

Kleines Parkett 8/6 € | Tickets

 

Reading and discussion with Kemi Alabi, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Kay Gabriel and Eileen Myles

U.S. American poets Kemi Alabi, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Kay Gabriel and Eileen Myles radically explore the boundaries of poetic language. In seeking to express marginalized perspectives and experiences, they question received wisdom, familiar patterns, common attributions, and powers of representation and interpretation. In their texts, these poets deconstruct existing linguistic material and reassemble it, breaking it down into component parts to expand and transform what language can achieve. Words and phrases are reinvented, the familiar and the archaic are incorporated, and completely new descriptive possibilities are forged. On this evening, the authors will read from their poems and speak about fluid identities, poetry, and re-describing the world.

 

Alabi, Kemi • Brolaski, Julian Talamantez • Myles, Eileen • Gabriel, Kay

POETRY TALK: Eileen Myles & Alice Notley

Offering The Healing Of Words Reading & Conversation

Kleines Parkett 7/5 € | Tickets

 

An encounter between the second and third generations of the New York School: Alice Notley (born 1945 Bisbee, Arizona/USA) and Eileen Myles (born 1949 in Cambridge, Massachusetts). A mentor-student relationship, though it isn’t always clear which is which. “I’m the one who has no / small feelings,” writes Alice Notley. Her poems are fearless, visionary, shamanistic, in lively exchange with the dead (Whatever I think is heard by the dead) and the collective unconscious. The Boston Review has written that Alice Notley has freed herself from any notion of what poetry should be in order to write what poetry can be. In this and every other respect, her work is unique: “I’m only alive and am my own guide.”

Myles, Eileen • Notley, Alice