Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles and Dennis Cooper on staying sane, sending snail mail and the old New York City

Text by
Joshua Glass

Photography by
Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Posted
January 28, 2018

The poet Eileen Myles ran as an “openly-female” write-in candidate in the U.S. presidential election against George H. W. Bush in 1992. At a time when a minority win was nearly unfathomable (then Arkansas’s governor Bill Clinton and the businessman Ross Perot headed the Democratic and Independent parties’ tickets), her act was one of championship and social defiance. She had done so after Bush declared that the country’s greatest threat to free speech was posed by what he deemed “the politically correct”—the marginalized activists, minorities, women, people of color, queers, and those Myles described as “everybody who he didn’t want to hear from more than once”—were a source of conflict. While Clinton eventually took hold of office, Myles’s nearly year-and-a-half-long campaign / pseudo-performance piece was emblematic of the queer writer’s own creative oeuvre. In her nearly two dozen printed and published works in full, Myles has exploited raw emotion and social critiques with biting wit. Much of her work decodes New York City as a locale—a place that she first moved to in 1974 to become a poet and would eventually become a hub for her creative friends, like the author turned publisher Dennis Cooper. Although situated across the country in Los Angeles, Cooper was a steady fixture in the 80s literary scene and quickly became pen pals with Myles. They first met, in fact, via U.S. postage, when each had been sent copies of the other’s magazine: Myles’s Dodgems (1977-1979), which published radical poems from the likes of John Ashbery and Barbara Guest and Cooper’s cross-discipline Little Caesar, which eventually became his imprint. Here, the old friends speak for the first time in nearly a decade about their early beginnings and the changes they’ve encountered along the way.