Award-Winning Poet Eileen Myles

Poet, writer, and feminist icon Eileen Myles will read from selected works during a talk at Bard College at Simon’s Rock.  This event is free and open to the public.

An award-winning author of 19 books, including I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems, and a 2015 reissue of Chelsea Girls, Myles has earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in non-fiction, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, and the Shelley Prize.

Myles’ talk is the keynote for the upcoming conference, “The Feminine Mystic: American Prophetesses and the Politics of Religious Experience,” co-hosted by Bard College at Simon’s Rock and Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon from Friday, June 9 to Sunday, June 11.

Eileen Myles ran for president in 1992 as a write-in candidate and the only “openly-female” candidate in the race. In one of a series of campaign letters she compared the write-in vote, by its nature an act of dissent, to writing poetry: “you spread the metal wings above the title, ‘President,’ and an empty white space appears, empty as poetry and this is your freedom of speech.” The race was neither a stunt nor a departure from writing: sharing in the visionary yet overwhelmingly masculine tradition extending from Milton to Blake to Ginsberg, Myles’s verse illuminates American visionary poetics for “openly-female” writers as necessarily, if often unconventionally, political; and her presidential run, in the same way, revealed a variety of poetics within the politics of resistance.

In this way, Myles inherits and extends the visionary politics of American women of the 18th and 19th centuries. Politics and poetics respond to and press against the constraints of their historical moment, so that the constraints produce, in certain ways, the form of a message. Yet if the form, for Myles, is different from the historical women who are primarily the subjects of this conference, the message is consistent: the Feminine Mystic figures profoundly across the arc of American history, complicating that history with a dissenting narrative that is also, often, the deciding narrative.

www.eileenmyles.com
Read more about Eileen

For more information about the conference visit: simons-rock.edu/feminine-mystic.

photo: Peggy O'Brien