Afterglow is described on the jacket as a “dog memoir”, and by Eileen Myles as “a weirdo, Kafka-type book” that is also a “screwy memoir of queerness”. For those familiar with Myles’s work, these descriptions shouldn’t surprise; for the past 40 years, Myles has lived in accordance with the principle, expressed in the 1991 poem “Peanut Butter”: “I am absolutely in opposition / to all kinds of / goals”. The book, like the life, defies categories. What is surprising, perhaps, is that at 68 Myles has been taken up by the mainstream, featuring in a New York Times magazine shoot last year, lauded byLena Dunham and Maggie Nelson, and providing the basis for a character in Transparent. The world of fringe poetry can be unforgiving and in previous years, on the basis of much milder success, Myles was accused by some peers of selling out. And now? The poet smiles, and says drily: “I think I would know if I had written Eat, Pray, Love.”
We are in the East Village, New York, where Myles has lived for the last four decades, in a rent controlled apartment that doesn’t cost much more than it did in the 70s. It is the writer’s preference to be referred to in the third person plural, “because I think it holds masculine and feminine and everything in between”. Using the pronoun “they”, although “it sounds a little funny”, is worth having a stab at, says Myles, because it confirms the poet’s view that men and women aren’t monoliths.
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