Not Me (Native Agents) by Eileen Myles

by Eileen Myles

Listen, I have been educated. I have learned about Western Civilization. Do you know What the message of Western Civilization is? I am alone. This breakthrough volume, published in 1991 by the author of Cool For You and Chelsea Girls captures the high points of Myles' work in New York City during the 1980s. Poet, novelist, lesbian culture hero and one-time presidential candidate, Myles has influenced a whole generation of young queer girl writers and activists. She is one of the most brilliant, incisive, immediate writers living today.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Nonfiction, Essays, Gay, Feminism

Unknown Binding

First published June 1, 1991

About the author

Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades.

Reviews

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book on a long car ride through the east coast. I was tagging along my sister's tour for her rock band. The midwest is such a bubble, y'know. I was in the smelly heat of Cincinnati with all its skinny Italian buildings, and murals of clouds on the brick. Apparently, the Ohio River does that, makes the air hotter. And the mountains on the way to Virginia were terrifying. I mean, absolutely crazy and huge, like a body. Crevices that go down. I hadn't showered in awhile. I was sleeping on the floor every night, my sticky body on top of the red sleeping bag from the 80s. I was sitting in the backseat, on the way to Boston when I finished the final essay of 'Not Me'. I will never ever forget that. It was one of those things - I closed the book and said "holy shit" out loud. I really do feel like a museum of myself. Eileen Myles is a diary, a smelly night driving through America, "exhibitionist work," a cult movie, a painting. She was the details, she was the poem. I was a girl travelling through boredom, going to different dumb bars every night, getting drunk, watching bands, and looking out the window all the while at the rectangle of people walking by on the strip of sidewalk. I took a selfie in my friends' art studio, a shrine of women, a Joan of Arc book sits on the mantle. In my tote bag was this little green book. Oh man, I am never alone! Eileen Myles is like that - "a friendly gesture towards the people who might recognize me."

[C.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book STOMPED through my young mind when I first read it! Eileen Myles was, and remains, one of the best poets of her generation! This earlier book is like a conversation on speed, exciting as it is addictive, the line breaks various sized columns that break your neck to break the line. Gorgeous epiphanies sledge hammer you along the way, AND, you really are almost irritated when it's over, wanting more. BUT, there is more, CHECK OUT her books SKIES, and ON MY WAY, and others!

HALLELUJAH for this book!
CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

[Kevin Mckinney · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And my art can’t
be supported until it is
gigantic, bigger than
everyone else’s, confirming
the audience’s feeling that they are
alone. That they alone
are good, deserved
to buy the tickets
to see this Art.
Are working,
are healthy, should
survive, and are
normal. Are you
normal tonight? Everyone
here, are we all normal."

[Hänna · Rating 3 out of 5]

hab viele gedichte nicht ganz durchstiegen, war aber auch schön so. der band eignet sich perfekt, um durch verlassene sommerstädte zu streunen und sich nach new york zu träumen. ansonsten gehts sehr viel um sehnsucht nach nähe (bzw sex, um ehrlich zu sein) und myles’ butch identität

[Rachel Davies · Rating 5 out of 5]

everyone's gotta read it

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

the kind of poetry that will occasionally lose me but then will suddenly come back with a line that hits me so square in the jaw i have to read and re-read it just to make sure myles really is able to manipulate language so cleverly. they have a particular talent for making the english language feel malleable and organic — rules of grammar and punctuation are eschewed in a way that makes their poetry feel like one long, ruminative internal monologue, the kind of thing i hear in my head and wish so badly i was able to sketch out as well as they do. the poems of not me oscillate wonderfully between eloquent and rugged, poetic and prosaic. it's new york city poetry, man. it makes me want to either dress like edie sedgwick or a dad in a levi's jeans commercials and walk down the streets with a brown paper bag of liquor in the crook of my arm like a baby. and also be splayed on someone's denim lap while i sit half-in and half-out of a fire escape, smoking a cigarette and complaining about nothing in particular.

i really like: an american poem, hot night, peanut butter (my absolute favorite), and then the weather arrives, early morning letter, keats & i

putting my favorite lines in one place for the sake of convenience:

(Peanut Butter)
And / I am an enemy / of change, as / you know. All / the things I / embrace as new / are in / fact old things, / re-released: swimming, / the sensation of / being dirty in / body and mind / summer as a / time to do / nothing and make / no money. Prayer / as a last re- / sort. Pleasure / as a means, / and then a / means again / with no ends / in sight. I am / absolutely in opposition / to all kinds of / goals. I have / no desire to know / where this, anything / is getting me.

(An American Poem)
And my art can't / be supported until it is / gigantic, bigger than / everyone else's, confirming / the audience's feeling that they are / alone. That they alone / are good, deserved / to buy the tickets / to see this Art. / Are working, / are healthy, should / survive, and are / normal. Are you / normal tonight? Everyone / here, are we all normal.

(Hot Night)
In July / I am filled / with the death / of the streets, / you've seen / me before— / you're a wit- / ness to the / death of / my innocence / which came / teetering here / without ap- / petite. If / anything lives / I have seen / it in the street & why / am I falling in love / now with the old / & the scabrous.

(Promotional Material)
I / can hardly / hold my head / up in the / morning & drink / my first cup / & then I am / lucky. It / comes over me / an uncontrollable / wave of joy./ I am alive. / I am living / in the life / I used to / come home & / look at at / lunch & wish / that I could / hold. I have / held it so / long it is / moldy.

(Mal Maison)
Failure, of course / is a more interesting / obstacle than / joy. It makes me / stronger, right? / It makes me more / like Winston / Churchill than / the normal / celebrity of / things going / well, procrastinating / & visiting, basking / in my latest vic- / tory about my- / self.

(And Then the Weather Arrives)
I don't know no one / anymore who's / up all night. / Wouldn't it be fun / to hear someone / really tired / come walking / up your stairs / and knock on your door. / Come here / and share the rain / with me. You. / Isn't it wonderful to hear / the universe / shudder. How old it all, / everything, / must be.

(Keats & I)
Try to tell / a flashlight / about the / dark things / in the room / try and describe / I can only / describe the / reality of children / from the reality / of being a child, / once.

(Ponder)
I hate to think / I ever functioned / as a lane / for someone else's / desire, now let / me think, who did I lost it / to? Some girls just / wanted to get rid / of it. Oh I'm a diamond / in the rough but / you can't see me.

[Donald · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Goodreads description of Eileen Myles calls her a hero and when I read her poetry I feel like the world is beautiful and I am beautiful and everything is hopeful and I can do everything and forget I feel guilty all the time. I have ideas of ridiculous things to do because I think they'd be neat but whose appeal my friend's do not understand and discourage me from doing like reading poetry out loud in public parks without permission or running for president. When I read Eileen Myles I feel like she's telling me to do all of those things. This is writing that makes me think I can reshape the world in a way I think is good. The Man of Steel's got nothing on Eileen Myles.

[CJ Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those that you just wanna reread and reread again! Makes me want to move to New York even though I live here. Made me buy Proust. Read Peanut Butter

[S꩜phie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This didn't grab me the whole time, but it really picked up some heat at the end. I loved the "How I wrote certain of my poems" appendix, I wish more poets would do that—a few pages on the process. It's not like a poet owes a reader that insight, but it feels so intimate and refreshing. Maybe I should just read more craft books.

3.5 stars, but rounding up because "Peanut Butter" is one of my favorite poems in the world.

[paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

awesome collection, I wish more of these were archived online. Mal Maison and Peanut Butter have always been favorites and got to discover new gems like Mad Pepper and Dad’s Bag. Every poem wasn’t remarkable but a good enough chunk were to warrant 5 stars

[Brooks Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book I always travel with. This book has made an enormous impact on me. It was the inspiration for my first book (in some ways).

[Clara Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peanut Butter!!!

And An American Poem - Stumbling upon a video of Eileen Myles reading American Poem on Youtube changed my life - introduced me to them & to the New York School & to punk & to poetry.

[gabriella · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is made to be read in one sitting… dragged a bit after i’d misplaced it for a few days

[Greer Lowenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

i dislike the first 40 pages of this so much that i almost put it down but im so grateful i didnt!

[Julie Jacuzzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeg kan li sommer
fordi det er
så fucking varmt.

[Matthew M.]

§ The first time around Not Me, these poems provided me with a scaffolding that provided me with some level of discomfort given some of my own attitudes of a political nature. Let me explain. Firstly, this scaffolding appeared in my initial reading as a kind of poetic ledger testifying to the female’s bleak state or social position in the world, but perhaps more specifically, in American social constructs. I became hesitant of what I was being told: I thought identity politics was again being flogged to death by an insistence for recognition in the social sphere. I’m not insensitive to the plight of identity politics, but rather weary of its societal implications to bind ourselves to a fixed idea of ourselves exclusive of others. But as my reading intensified, I noticed a glimmer of something more complex than the whiny body of self-declarative assertions of self and outspoken sexual preferences. As in the poem, “A Poem,” “Life is a vow that frightens as it deepens.” The vow that Myles imagines is embedded in the poems almost peripatetic quality, where as Robert Creeley once said, the poet thinks with the poem. Here, Myles walks us through her poems, while enacting that walking through the poems themselves.

§ As a whole, the poems do bemoan the exclusion of others off the social map in a way that narrates a lament that includes what we might call the collective citizenry. For instance, in the poem, “The Sadness of Leaving,” the speaker says “I’m terrified/to go & you/won’t miss me/I’m terrified by the/bright blues of/the subway/other days I’m/so happy &/prepared to believe/that everyone walking/down the street is/someone I know.” This poem, informed by a cosmopolitan setting, charts the complexities of emotion that don’t simply belong to ones understanding of self, but that extend to include the outside of social affairs as indicted by the “bright blues of/the subway…” The cityscape is not just a textual strategy for the poem, but the very site of poet’s process of thought. As Myles’ poems present, the city provides a collectivity where reciprocity is often relegated to ones imagination. In other words, it becomes the dream within the dream.

§ Another aspect of Myles’ poems I wish to present is the usage of plain spoken language. One reviewer of Not Me has aptly said that “very seldom do her words call attention to their wordness.” There is certainly a way that these poems can be read quickly while losing much of their substance, but I would argue that if the poems carry any deceptions for a reader, it’s in the diction, which is strikingly quotidian. Thus, that the poem is made of words and, of course, our experiences are always mediated by language. While, for me, the wordness of the poems is apparent, Myles’ terse lines allow for a kind of recasting of time by the simple turning of one phrase or statement into the other, thereby changing the scope of a reader’s attention. The gaze upon the text is directed downward, where transience follows by way of a poem’s form. Here, time has as much to do with the pacing of thought, and the utterances of narration and their personas.

§ Lastly, Myles successfully merges the private with the public. I am not willing to assume that the private is independent of history or economic and social statuses, however, as far as national boundaries are concerned, Myles is working in a particular American vein, but one inflected with a radical otherness. While the poems are quite aware of their limitations to change anything, they do emit this exuberance that the poem itself can be a political act of conscience or perhaps interrogate the cultural forms as they exist around us. From “Hot Night” the speakers says “My/poetry is here/for the haul,/the lonely woman’s/tool—we have/tools now, we/have words &/lists, we have/real tears now,/absence, rage &/missing you is/not possible in/the New York/rain because/your name/is caught between/the drops &/I might throw up…” While the utterance of this passage seems to begin as a private confession, its movement asserts a social position made explicit by the “New York rain,” and the complexities of that position to name “caught between drops.” As in this poem, Myles enacts a poetics not of alterity, but of mapping the quotidian in a way that’s spatially alert to inner and outer locations. These locations have to do with identity and acceptance of difference, but in Myles’ poems, the insistence on speculating the ills of our time is conducted through concrete. In other words, the poems are not other-worldly, but of our time and contain multiplicities and contradictions in regard to self, culture, and nation.

[Ellie Botoman · Rating 4 out of 5]

new york city baby

[Vic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me gustaron muchísimo los poemas, tiene varias joyitas y es una voz muy única. Es un 3.5 más que nada porque la traducción me pareció poco consistente.

[Abby]

So, yes, lesbian NYC poetry from three decades ago, this is apparently what channels all my feels these days. Thank God for Eileen Myles and Adrienne Rich and whatever enabled them to stand up for the feels. "We [lesbians] are always at the vanguard of relational concepts," Myles said in the 2016 essay that was the reason I read this book (https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/eileen...). And maybe that is true, because nobody gets your heart status like Eileen Myles. I may turn around and read this all again, or I may go get another book (she has so many!). I haven't decided yet.

[Loretta Riach · Rating 5 out of 5]

favourite forever. poems of scope and clarity, poems like biting dogs and hot pavements. peanut butter is an all-timer for a reason. “I write because I would like to be used for years after my death”….yeah

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

i haven't read all of not me, i think, but that doesn't matter because mostly i feel like books of poetry are never finished. mostly this is a piece of writing about the poem "peanut butter" which is why i bought the book, so i could own peanut butter. i bought this on the last day of april when all poetry at the co-op was ten percent off all month for national poetry month, so i could own peanut butter for ten percent off. there were i think two nights in a row where i read aloud eileen myles to my friend while he made scrambled eggs in the basement kitchen, 2:30am or so. a deal: he supplied the food, i supplied the poetry. i didn't read much recreationally this year (as the absence of ~goodreads activity~ probably made clear). it was awful. it was awful and it was weird because i've always defined myself as A Person Who Reads, and perhaps to my peers i was The Person Who Reads. even to the ones i didn't know, really. so in college i was just A Person, and it was weird to realize, well, i can survive as A Person. (i am writing this now because now i am back home after my first year of college and i am not sure what kind of Person i am.) but peanut butter was vital. there were moments reading not me where i thought, i cannot survive without eileen myles, i cannot survive without this. i was reading something about jacqueline woodson, who was just recently appointed the poetry foundation's 'young people's poet laureate,' and she declared, re: reaching The Youth with poetry, that poetry is a party everybody's invited to. which is a nice, optimistic statement that i'm not sure i can in good faith completely agree with—so much of poetry is hard, so much of poetry is intentionally hard, so much of poetry is exclusionary, and none of that can be declared away—but that's how i feel about eileen myles, if you can get away from how a word like "party" is sort of intuitively wrapped up with the concept of frivolity. eileen myles is a party and eileen myles is necessary. we should all read peanut butter, but only if you want to.

[Maeve O'Donnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

My sibling gave me this collection and I love it a lot. My favorite poem is "Mal Maison". When I got COVID this year and had to be in quarantine I got really drunk one night and transcribed it onto a google doc (i couldn't find it online and wanted to send it to a friend) and ended up sending it to this girl I don't know very well. it opens very intensely ("And so i got some marigolds/ instead of slitting/ my wrists tonight") and ended up being like 15 pages long because of how short the lines are so it was actually really embarrassing that i did that. plus she didn't respond..... oop. i like the parts about the cowboy girlfriend and the whole movie script/other life part and also the bit about the german words ohh and the part where they say they get separation anxiety every time the numbers on the clock achieve a new cycle. anyway if anyone doesn't have the book and wants the google doc of mal maison you know who to ask!

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 2 out of 5]

"An American Poem," which opens the collection, is of course Myles's masterpiece, but man, the rest of this book—it's like a document of Myles in the very early stages of trying to figure out what her style and her substance is. The vast majority of the poems here are entirely forgettable; a good line here and there, but forgettable all the same. And a great number of them are just...embarrassingly bad? Which I feel all right saying because I'm crazy about most of her other work—Skies, from 2001; School of Fish, from 1997. I love Inferno and The Importance of Being Iceland and I think (the forthcoming) Afterglow is probably the best thing she's ever done. So, just skip this volume.

[Julene]

Her poem about her father's bag and finally letting it go kills me! It is my favorite and makes me cry. Her books reflect her life in years present like a journal that lives. She is amazing and I love listening to her read and talk when she's in town. She is the kind of radical, like Patti Smith, who stands out and draws me in. She has heart.

[Bobbi Lurie]

I love this book. I have read it many times / am re-reading it. I love her clarity.


I stopped reading--please take off list

[Jenn Pelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

“…the poet had been doing a little dance about whether there was a god or not and resolved that there was a new notebook and that would have to do.”

[Abbyg. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bukowski de-Duded!

[Marisa Scavo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eileen Myles is very good at loosely guiding you towards an esoteric, academic, and somewhat pretentious view of New York poetry and then slamming in the opposite direction in an incredibly low brow manner. They’re wistful. They’re hard to understand. And then they’re grounding and accessible and talking about smoking on a stoop at 2am in the east village. It’s a tight balance to walk. One step off and it’s insufferable. Another step and it’s lewd. But they walk down the middle constantly prompting whether the tension will break. Their poems elicit an intangible feeling of being in New York in the summer. Questioning, wandering, sweaty. If you’ve felt it, you know.

“It’s not the poor,
It’s not the rich,
It’s us.
And improved public
Transportation.
And cable TV
I’m giving up the idea
Of writing a great poem.
I hate this shitty little place.
And a dog takes
A bite of the night.
We realize the city was
Sold in 1978…
But we were asleep.
We work and the victors
were all around us,
criticizing our pull-chain lights.
And we began to pray.”

[Rodrigo Ferreyra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eileen arranca su libro de elocuente y poderosa, con una clara toma de postura y crítica hacia la sociedad estadounidense. Apenas leí ese primer poema quedé fascinado por la fortaleza ideológica que me transmitió. Y de hecho, esa fortaleza, la forma en que se planta y expone sus ideas sin vueltas ni tapujos es lo que le da valor a su escritura. Sin embargo, esa emoción inicial se fue diluyendo conforme avanzaba en la lectura, no pude conectar mucho más. No sé si por la traducción o por la forma tan oral que tiene la autora, a muchos de sus escritos los hallé casi sin sentido. Me gusta la poesía oral, la poesía sencilla por así decirlo, sin tantas metáforas, pero en el caso de Myles siento que peca de oral al punto de transcribir una charla que puede tener con un amigo y que no tiene mucho más valor que algo lisa y llanamente cotidiano.

[ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I was born in Boston in
1949. I never wanted
this fact to be known, in
fact I’ve spent the better
half of my adult life
trying to sweep my early
years under the carpet
and have a life that
was clearly just mine
and independent of
the historic fate of
my family.”

loved this one so much more than Myles’ most recent collection. very ‘i do this, i do that’ poetry—epitomizing the heritage of the new york school and frank o’hara :’)