An artist's responsibility for a very long time is to get collected, socially' (33). If something bad happens to the poor person, the rich person would help. Poor people tend to know what's going on plus they are often good-looking, at least when they are young and even later they are the cool interesting people the rich person once slept with, so the poor person always feathers the nest of the rich. 'Because rich people need poor friends (but not too poor!) to maintain their connection to the struggle that spawned them even if they never struggled. also beautiful warnings throughout, like: Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live' (270). These little things, whether I write them or not. What writes my poem is a second ring, inner or outer. 'The room was the poem, the day I was in. I lost her after a while, and of course she was never mine, I borrowed her and she borrowed me from our lives' (268). As soon as the poem ceases to be about anything, when it even stops saving things, stops being such a damn collector, it becomes an invite to the only refuge which is the impossible moment of being alive. I think people can feel this accessing of time in poetry very readily. It lives in the present, it breathes there and that's how you let anyone in. 'What I started to understand was that the poem was made out of time - past, present and future. On this last, she gives, near work's end, several guiding definitions: in fact one of the things i love most about her writing is how successfully she risks an unfinished surface.Ī few large themes orient the work: the business and politics and capital of the 'poetry field,' what self-abuse seems necessary there the ecstasies and agonies of sex, not relationships so much as the melancholic self-contemplations of the serious gigolo the poem as valueless and therefore essential home and grave of it all. which belies a carefully sloppy sequencing, rough stitches to let the air and light in.

yet it also has myles' great openness, as if it really were just her notebook and its feverish post-event, post-break-up, post-reading heart pouring. both the heft of trying for decades worth of personal history and also like it was meant to be done right. This messy, score-settling, no-longer-pure-but-still pure memoir has some heft to it. poetry is the same thing but no one pays and it's more personal and pure because, frankly, no one gives a fuck. I remember reading some kim gordon interview where she said rock and roll was paying to watch someone else be free.

Eileen myles dog book