School of Fish

by Eileen Myles

In School of Fish Eileen Myles hooks our attention and reels it in with a pulsing, sinuous rush of images seized from urban life's experimental flow: Illuminating these densely and intensely alive new poems is an eloquent and revealing prose essay, "The Lesbian Poet", wherein Myles addresses the sources of her art, paying homage to her favorite living poets and early influences, and spelling out her own vitalist / proprioceptive aesthetic: "I think we all write out poems with our metabolism, our sexuality, for me a poem has always been an imagined body of a sort, getting that down in time, it moves this way and that, it is full of its own sense of possibility".

With agility, grace and speed, Eileen Myles explores poetic possibilities, stretching linguistic boundaries while hungrily searching for the taste of life's quick core. "I have this compulsion to live no matter what..".

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer

200 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1997

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

[Jennifer Stoy]

I'm not going to rate this....because I didn't like it. That's not a knock on Myles. For whatever reason, her way of communicating only connects with my aesthetics about 25% of the time and the rest of the time I feel like a particularly bad reader who is like "what the hell is she talking about? What happened to her dad, really? Why am I 100% confused about her poem about being a man?" and to me that seems like a failure to connect, rather than, necessarily, a failure of art, especially when some of the "easier" poems like the one about Cobain absolutely worked for me, as did the one about seeing "a waterfall" in Iceland (and I've seen that waterfall, it's a remarkable sight) and all the world being a slice of bread.

The part of me that is a Xellennial who eschews most of the glamour and place-ness around say, the Lower East Side and the canyons Joni Mitchell and Joan Didion talked about found myself annoyed, but again, I think that's a generational rift AND a personal aesthetic preference.

[Alexander Spanksly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not all of these hit but when they did…

[Joe Olipo · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The nominal blanks of fictions like [Edgar Allen] Poe’s, seem like a careful attempt to hold open a tale’s potential field of address. Such openness may have helped get Poe’s tales and poems published, and republished, effectively providing Poe with a 'mobile form of capital.' Seen in this light, the typography of [Poe's Blank] works something like the typography of a job-printed checkbook, since both facilitate monetary exchange." — Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge

On Being "On a Boat"

We recently had the dubious pleasure of joining the former mayor in a trip around the marina in his twelve-seat cabin cruiser — a counterclockwise diesel-powered excursion without apparent purpose. My mother, who is usually sharp about such things, later supplied a disappointing interpretation of this event, not recognizing the boat in its role as both setting and actor in the mayor's Male Power Phantasy.

Eileen Myles is kind of the Carnival Cruise of poets: tall books like smokestacks, having a lot of influence in Washington, and presumably serving a quality buffet (though I've never been). Perhaps this charmed life is due to Myles's early recognition that "the English language is extremely boaty" (Myles, For Now). The characteristic Eileen Myles poem is using (sparingly, but always to great effect) something I call, "putting the [stanza] in its place." See if you can spot the short phrase doing labor at the end of the line:

Your
voice was like
salt in in
my life
on the phone.
[. . .]

& the air
was better
than ever
on a bus.
[. . .]

that you
were
the love
of my
life
on a boat

— Eileen Myles (various collections)

It's remarkable how "placing" these stanzas can turn a melodramatic phrase into a prosaic one (in a good sense). Sometimes a very difficult problem really can be solved with "one weird trick." (Houellebecq is doing something similar when he solves the problem of bad paragraphs by transposing the second sentence with the last. (Being a hack, he is much more reliant upon such tricks.))

Gertrude Stein, who remains one of our best contemporary writers (despite what chronology would suggest), was perhaps first to remark the important difference between sentences and paragraphs: "Paragraphs are emotional, sentences are not" (Autobiography of Alice Toklas). Certain phrases from Stein would appear to prefer the paragraph. (e.g. "Taste has nothing to do with sentences," and it's not a stretch to say that Myles's extended free verse poems sometimes read like bad paragraphs — but this is a mistaken interpretation. Gertrude Stein's critique of the sentence can be turned around itself, to harness "tasteless" phrases as a kind of unconventional strength. In fact, the power in an Eileen Myles poem might come from an even smaller structure: the fragment of a sentence that comes to mind when everything else has been forgotten. I'm always thinking of that line from one of Myles's other collections: "I don't think of him but I use his lines all the time." (This is from Skies (2001), a better collection than this one. Though Myles is a lot like W.G. Sebald, in that it takes a bit of effort to distinguish the fine gradations of quality in a body of work that is very much consistently "paying the bills.")

Nobody is talking about how Eileen Myles is one of the eminent Concrete Poets of our age. (The Poetry Foundation defines Concrete Poetry as: "Verse that emphasizes nonlinguistic elements in its meaning, such as a typeface that creates a visual image of the topic. Examples include George Starbuck’s “Poem in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree”.) Most readers appreciate how Myles is using the line break as a form of punctuation, which might flow smoothly into spoken verse at a live reading. Few recognize how Myles is using the line break to write concrete poems in the third dimension. (To picture the concrete poem as the kitsch arrangement of words in the shape of a christmas tree is to be in error.) Lisa Gitelman remarks how Edgar Allen Poe abbreviates the names of people and places with a long em-dash, which allows his work to circulate more broadly as a "mobile form of capital.” For Poe, the blank line on the page works something like the typography of the blank line on a traveler's cheque. Myles's poems, which track furiously down the page like a line of ticker tape, are doing something similar, in that they're creating a sculpture in three dimensions. From afar all this accumulated blank space on the page takes on the appearance of a book — whereas it's really a mobile form a capital. The secret of poetry is that no one is willing to pay $15 for a chapbook. Myles's genius is selling a chapbook that, viewed from the side, is the sculpture of a novel you'd pay $15 for.

(Tasteless) Myles Fragments :

i was looking
for sympathy
and you asked
me for the menu

could I accidentally
get eaten
slipping into your
sandwich

I couldn't get over the weather
it was like a punch
that came up from the inside
a sock to my blood
everywhere

I love
it. She
only
laughs
on the
outside
it's like
she's chewing

you done me wrong
me you done me wrong
me you done me wrong
me me me me

Painters taught me to look at the edges. That's when you aestheticize, when you get to the edge.

you can see the man who knew
so much had a lousy house
Thomas Cole
the other one had insurance
money
it makes a difference
you know

He' s laughing at what I wrote. You said she has a really big cunt. Isn't that the worst thing he shrieks. It's an insult. You know they like it tight. Isn't that why men leave their wives after they've had babies. Suddenly he's looking up a hole. But, it's different for us. We love it. Huge with desire. An incredible dripping cave.

Just for the fuck of it
my arms are stripes
I fling them upwards
to be part of it, trees
to be one with all the things

the ringing sounds of your hoofs
in the light in the woods
Tonight.

he died when the century
was one

every veronica makes me sad

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

[...]
the endearing
form of
the toilet
bowl

David Rattray
died
this year

the Last Judgement
will be based
on the weather
& earth and
how we
treat it

it's always
a burning
village

Honor has on her
land
a very
old tree

masturbating
here, in
a train
bathroom
1983
[...]
- 1993 (pg. 92-93)


[...]
some of us
just live
our lives
faster to
avoid being
eaten

dinosaurs
invented
flowers
[...]
- 1993 (pg. 113)


It's narrow
down here
a small
turn can
be very
wrong.

the female voice
is the sound
of the future
don't you
think

Modulated
& the door
close softly
it is 4 o'clock
- The City (pg. 146)


[...] It's all how they hate women,
I said. They hate us so much that there
are like four roles, like statues,
and they can't see you id you're anything else
[...]
- Christmas (pg. 150)


[...]
under a moon
dead something
disconnected
something else
don't care
everlast outbreak
the batteries
be precise
asteroids don't do it.
Kid stuff,
foreign countries,
language
tits, no
sex don't
cars die
building all
wrong
my schedule
inevitable
salt 'n pepper
please. Who
won?
- Spaceless (pg. 155)

[Rachel Kamphaus · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Writing is making marks,” Myles says, or something to that effect. It’s clear from a lot of Myles’ other writing that literature isn’t something that they take particularly seriously (a great remark in For Now says that literature is only special in its capacity to “waste time”) which informs their style quite heavily. Most of Myles’ poetry has an organic, spontaneous, un-edited quality to it, for better or worse. There are a couple of great pieces in this collection, but sometimes, the poems feel rushed, and at worst, thoughtless.

[ocelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

favorites:
at a waterfall, reykjavik
poem for my new fortunes

[Arcade Annie]

Poet Eileen Myles brings moments out of time and shows the reader, through the particular lens of her perspective, the significance of that moment, or sometimes a shared universal experience in matters like love, war and death.

Many of these moments can be found in her volume of poetry, School of Fish. In this volume of poetry, she brings to the reader personal moments of experience.

The Lesbian Poet
The moments Myles presents in her poems range from the dark explorations of the possible reasons behind her father’s suicide, to the more mundane: sitting on a park bench watching her dog chase geese in a park.

She writes of stripes of light, of her dog Rosie and city animals; she writes of water and homeless men; she writes of her father and food; she writes of being a lesbian and what it might be like if she were a man.

In this collection, Myles states her poetic manifesto in The Lesbian Poet. She writes about her identity as a lesbian poet, and the responsibilities she has to both men and women.

In many of her poems she writes about being a man, or feeling like a man, and she also writes about being female. She writes to an audience of both men and women and wants both to be included as an audience.

Although she had been celebrated as a feminist poet, and indeed identifies herself as a lesbian, Myles clearly states in her poetic manifesto that her poems are for everyone. She is not an isolationist.

[Syd · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first introduction to Myles and I have to say I'm sad that I'm just getting around to her. I read her essay on poetry that was included in this volume twice because it was that brilliant.

[Grover · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite essays ever "on being a Lesbian Writer" is in this book. I totally love that Myles puts an essay in every book of poetry. It's so right.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I especially enjoyed the poem titled "Eileen's Vision."

[Sean A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

myles is master of the short line and haphazard city-bound image. even when standing by a volcano in iceland she sees no nature, but rather chunks of bread.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

my favorite line: "the cage is art"