For someone so indelibly associated with the East Village, it comes as no surprise when Eileen Myles suggests we meet in a hole-in-the-wall-type café to talk about this “shocking moment” (her words) in her career.

That “moment” is being described as her ascension into the mainstream. It’s taken a while to come – she’s 19 books into a career – but this week Myles has two books out from a commercial publisher: a reprint of her autobiographical novel Chelsea Girls, and I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2015.

On top of that she has been working on the upcoming season of the Emmy-award winning Amazon series Transparent, acting as a kind of consultant as the show creates a character that’s based on her. (She’ll be played by the veteran Broadway actress Cherry Jones, and says she “was approving her wardrobe and stuff”). This summer’s Lily Tomlin vehicle Grandma also took an epigraph from Myles’s work, and the character Tomlin played has been said to be based on Myles herself although she dismisses this.

Myles now has a Paris Review interview and a New York magazine profile to her name, which are the sorts of things the New York literary establishment awards you as lifetime achievement prizes. And, right on cue, one increasingly finds her books studding the Instagram feeds of a certain kind of bookish, stylish person (Lena Dunham’s given her approval).

But the Myles who greets me in this café doesn’t appear to be someone poised for the glare of commercial success. It’s not that she doesn’t seem content or in full possession of herself. “As a human being I’m kind of a cheery melancholic,” she says. “I have energy, I’m happy.”

But in person, her demeanour turns out to have much the same quality as her writing. She shows up simply dressed, unadorned by any of the rich trappings on offer in the post shops of the gentrified neighborhood around us. And as soon as we begin to talk, the kinetic energy of her mind sucks me right in.

She starts by telling me about how much trouble she’s had getting her selected poems published. One literary publishing house, she says, called it too big (“That means, ‘too female,’” Myles says). Her identity as an out lesbian – a “dyke”, in her terms – made it even harder to get publishers to believe she could have wide appeal. If you get her going on the subject of feminism she’ll tell you she thinks it might need a name change – “there’s so much stuff stuck to the outside of it” – but that she also considers social change her “life’s work”.

Myles can be wry on the subject of men’s dominance in the artistic and literary fields – in the art world, where she’s got a second career going as an art writer, she tells me, publishers literally tell women artists that their catalogues raisonné should be shorter than men’s.

“Whenever I tried to sell a narrative of any sort, they’re like where’s the arc?” she says of literary publishers, besides. “And what they mean is: where’s the male orgasm?” A series of entertaining noises and hand gestures follows, as she tries to illustrate the demands of personal epiphany that attend most contemporary memoirs.

Even when commercial dictates work for her, as with the sale of these two books and some of the attention they have garnered, she’s still skeptical. She’s had her struggles with her current publisher, particularly over the cover art on these books.

“It became clear that all [the publisher] could handle was photographs of me by famous artists,” she says, describing a long process of choosing them.

In the end, the covers each have a portrait photograph of Myles adorning them. One was taken by the Los Angeles artist Catherine Opie; the other by Robert Mapplethorpe. Each show a Myles staring directly at the camera, and they are so arresting that the New York Times critic Dwight Garner spent approximately half his review – mostly a positive one – waxing on about what she looked like in them. (“Ms Myles is lucky enough to have one of those faces that suggests she’s been to places the rest of us have not … You want to know where she’s come from; you want to know where she’s going.”) So, as far as selling a couple of perhaps aesthetically difficult books to a wider culture, the covers did their job.

She also casts a gimlet eye on the trend into which she is fits, what Edmund White, writing in the New York Times’s fashion magazine, T, recently called “a strong current of nostalgia for the late 1970s and 1980s in New York, even among those who never lived through it.” He pointed to the success of Rachel Kushner’s 2013 The Flamethrowers, and the anticipation of Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire this fall. “It’s a big thrift shop in writing,” Myles says.

Myles was a contemporary of Patti Smith’s, and even was somewhat inspired by her to become a poet. But she says she didn’t like Smith’s memoir, the award-winning Just Kids, in part because she feels it’s too rose-colored a take on the era. “Any woman who went through that era had a lot of problems,” Myles says, before referring to Smith: “She didn’t have any problems. Gimme a break, this is a complete puff piece.”



Usually writers are reticent to talk about the business nuts and bolts of publishing. But displays of obedience to the social order have never really been Myles’s thing. “If there is something I will always carry in my heart,” Myles writes late in Chelsea Girls, “it is this earnest unwillingness to be part of the bunch, the whole horrible let’s do it generation to which I belonged. A Catholic hand was raised to life.”

She came up as a lesbian poet whose work was never thought to have much commercial appeal; though she has long been a prominent intellectual and literary figure, doing so meant she scraped by for most of her life as a writer. There are many moments in Chelsea Girls and in her 2010 novel, Inferno, when the narrator-Myles is living on almost no food, out of money. This is something you don’t hear of, much, in artists’ work anymore. “There’s a shame of being broke,” Myles says.

When Myles is described as an “avant-garde” poet, it makes her art sound difficult and intimidating. It isn’t. Myles grew up working class in Boston, Massachusetts, and it gave her a kind of inherent self-consciousness. “I grew up understanding that I was smart, but also understanding that other people didn’t think so,” she says. So she has always wielded her form in a way which reflected her politics. Put differently, she writes in an accessible vernacular. There isn’t a lot of visible showmanship in the writing of her best poems. They deliver their meaning pretty directly, as in a passage you’ll find quoted all over social media from her For Jordana: I think writing/is desire/not a form/of it.

“I wanted to make up a new way of being smart,” she says, of the dent she hoped to make in the writing of poetry. She thinks people can use the language they already know to make art, and she has been a fierce defender of that idea. When the critic Marjorie Perloff complained of what she saw as the “tepidness” of contemporary poetry in the Boston Review, Myles issued a retort, accusing Perloff of being “deeply engaged in controlling the emotional climate of the room she’s in.” “That’s a problem,” Myles continued, “because poetry is a community, not an institution and we’re always at multiple purposes here in this room.”

Myles no doubt sees poetry that way in part because she began her career in an era where poets were not really in the academy, when authority and hierarchy in that corner of literature were not so tied to tenure-track professorships. When she arrived in New York, poets simply met at the Bowery Poetry Club, or at St Mark’s. MFAs have now replaced the community arts places, and while Myles isn’t purely a crtiic of the academy, she agrees that something’s been lost in the culture of artistry as it’s become so genteel and institutionalized. In her day, “you just rolled in on Friday night with your beer and Alice Notley was teaching a workshop. You brought drugs. It was just so different”. The mode of socializing, she says, was on a high-school level. “Everybody was just hanging out.”

As she talks about this I start to get envious. I ask her if she thinks it’s even possible to have that anymore, in New York, where rents are so high, where Ivy League grads dominate every level of the publishing industry. Myles pauses before answering.

“People just have to blow it up,” she says. “And honestly, that’s what I feel that I was doing for 30 years. I felt, in my heart, that I would make a living doing this if I just stuck to it. I thought, I mean this is very kind of American dream, but I was just like: ‘This is what I want. This is all I want. So it just has to work.’”