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librarihan's review against another edition
2.0
I just...didn't get it. I thought I was really going to enjoy this book. I'm typically not a fan of novels unless the writing is poignant and beautiful, and that's what I was expecting from Myles, being a poet. While some chapters were memorable, such as "a lesbian thing" and "my revolution," I found the rest of the book to be overwhelmingly confusing. Because the timeline skips around, I often found myself questioning when and where and with whom the story was taking place. People's names were especially confusing to follow. While I hoped this book would be relatable and eye-opening, it was ultimately just confusing and a little mundane. Maybe it is an acquired taste.
gaybf's review against another edition
5.0
I really loved this book! Myles makes everybody seem so human which I guess they are.
Favorite quotes:
She had this cute glint when she was being smart, which was always. She wasn't big smart, she didn't clobber you with words, she just kinda befriended us like wolves, but she believed that wolves were good, and could be taught, too.
Sometimes, in utter hopelessness, I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved.
"One person actually wrote a poem. Eileen, would you allow me to read it to the class?" There are moments when I felt literally drowned in life,
I loved to kiss- I loved to get lost in a drunk embrace [...] all the details of my life were in exact order, and yet I was tumbling in them, out of order like a wave had hit me
I believed that because I worked for things I was safe, meaning strong. To Abe, I just looked poor. To him I was some white female lump, to be bartered in this exchange
I loved how in college, you could just do nothing ...the golden age of college, three years ago. Sure, reading and writing my papers etcetera was good, and everything, but what was really great back then was how you could just suddenly decide to be a doctor. That's how it felt, you could join the peace corps, and you were thinking about it, you didn't have to do things, youdidn't have to change, so it was safe. ...I never had this before. And actually, I was terrified of it ending.
I mean if you do something and people see it, and they're impressed, it really seems you ought to be kind to them. But instead you wanna get away. Why?
Too damn nice was what it was. Being nice got scary in Padgett's hands, and then it got all innocent again,
He was exactly the friend that made me miss having friends.
Because rich people need poor friends (but not too poor!) to maintain their connection to the struggle that spawned them even if they never struggled. Poor people tend to know what's going on plus they are often good-looking, at least when they are young and even later they are cool interesting people the rich person once slept with, so the poor person always feathers the nests of the rich. If something bad happens to the poor person, the rich person would help. Everyone knows that. An artist's responsibility for a very long time is to get collected, socially.
We who write poetry [...] (being jammed with thin and irregularly shaped journals and books and people generally twenty or thirty) the stinking bars where poets meet and read in. In dozens even hundreds of stained and damp diaries the evidence accumulates, notebooks bent from getting shoved in back pockets, or written into during the long nights of the poet's youth (included here is the bonus time of people who managed to stay young extra long, till forty or fifty, sixty or seventy even, at last croaking then.)
Push my chair away, laughing. Here, try this.
In the sexual encounter of our lives (when your time is uncommodified, amateur, kid, punk, unobserved, over, before, days marked useless, private, unshipped, so to speak life stays in the swarm of free-range sex shifting into art, back to sex, art again. This is our belief.)
Bill Knott's was on warm vanilla paper, the type was bright red. The font was called Avant Garde.
It was called Poem to Myself:
The way the world is not
Astonished at you
It doesn't blink a leaf
Leads me to grop
That beauty is natural, unremarkable
&
I mean- if you were told that you could live that way- in a house entirely torn open, gutted. Something that doesn't so much rule the world, but generates it- well, what *would* you do?
The buildings were really close and the sun was hot and it was humid in a way that simply made you feel filthy, no matter how clean you were. Years later I learned to love it. Cause you'd go down into the subway and you'd think you were in hell. For some reason I liked that. Though it took years. I think you just need more experience to understand hell as something possibly good.
He was wearing a shirt I liked, a dark brown safari shirt with a lot of pockets. The woman who dumped him had given him this shirt. I just thought of love as travel. In your twenties you just kind of chug along, dredging up feelings as you go. It seemed like people then had a lot of feelings and you could get all bundled up like Eli had and brood with them for a while, or you could recoil entirely like I was doing (for professional reasons) and consider your behavior just art, grist for the mill.
We were so excited because the silence of our childhood was over. We wrote. We sat on the sidewalk outside of that house. We anticipated a response. We waited and waited. Then we simply forgot. But that sun, the first tiny symbol still sits there, blazing in my head.
the little girl who pops one right out, and as the not so old woman is moving her cigarette to her lipsticked mouth in the still heat of the New England summer, this kid. You're a hot ticket, Eileen. She just had to laugh. I had to make her.
People always looked like you hit them before they laughed, and that was the moment I loved to get- *without* violence. I would never hit a face. Yet I wanted it to be open a moment just for me.
The artist is sort of a child. Deliberately naive. Talkin dumb. Somebody stepped in regional kitsch. The artist pokes around, wastes a little time. Five years, ten. The artist must be entirely willing to live in the worst neighborhoods. Voluntarily the artist becomes poor and in that poverty she will begin to live in another time. A time outside of middle class America. The artist goes down to that other place for a while. Down like a roller coaster. Long enough to build a career.
We'll buy your house and your land when you're on the skids, when the fishing fails, then we'll build your children nice affordable housing. This is what's happening today in Wellfleet. The woman smiles. I hate lefties. I know. We don't want to live in affordable housing. I want your fucking house on the water.
A lot of romance is just the swapping of alibis.
The dancer standing there was like a big cookie. (A cookie I soon would be jamming my fist into.) We went upstairs. The light outside turned mauve while I was fucking her. Actually I'm not so good with having sex and writing about it (especially in a grant proposal), except to say it was great. It was really, really great. We had wonderful easy athletic sex.
What happened today. How could I be this much a stranger to the facts of my own existence.
The little dog followed me into rehearsals. The play hadn't even happened yet but I already imagined the summer that loomed as a gaping hole and now I had a friend to walk around its perimeter with. I will always remember the grass on First Avenue behind a chain link fence. The fence that surrounded those sort of nice housing projects on First. That look like they have huge amplifiers on the roof. Where Rose discovered grass. [...] she was like an old friend you go traveling with only to realize she is fluent in several languages she never mentioned to you before.
Looking at art is so hopeless. I mean if your life is falling apart.
I read every day till I was full- and anxious, which took a little less than an hour. Alone a person begins to know herself like a clock. I was a 43-year old calendar of shifting desire that summer.
reading must end and I couldn't bear my body anymore in its fake agreement with my mind, the body then vaulting over the mind's walls.
I guess they were seeing me. To write you get really alone. Now I had the sensation of having just landed or was dwelling in the softest space. It was this insane country living. Rarely does a lesbian, not this lesbian- rarely had I ever felt this cool. I was wearing this green shirt and my hair had grown into some condition of excess.
Like a spilt glass of milk, my life. A white pool shimmering on the floor. My corrupt womanhood: a waste. I feel the same way about being a writer. Staying up all night burning my brain cells, for years, swallowing cheap speed, also for years, writing poorly, pretty much drinking myself to death. And then not. Contracting whatever STD came to me in the seventies, eighties, nineties, smoking cigarettes, a couple a packs a day for at least twenty years, being poor and not ever really going to the doctor (only the dentist: flash teeth), wasting my time doing so little work, being truly dysfunctional, and on top of that, especially my point, being a dyke, in terms of the whole giant society, just a fogged human glass turned on its side. Yak yak yak a lesbian talking. And being rewarded for it. Not only wasted, but useless,
rancid, a wreck. It has come to me slow.
Nope, I am destroyed. A shattered boat of a person. A broken window here, a lousy bell there. An old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking a book. A drippy excrescence. A schmear.
You are the New Americans.
The homeless are wandering
the streets of our nation's
greatest city. Homeless
men with AIDs are among
them. Is that right?
That there are no homes
for the homeless, that
there is no free medical
help for these men. And women.
That they get the message
-as they are dying-
that this is not their home?
And how are your
teeth today? Can
you afford to fix them?
How high is your rent?
If art is the highest
and most honest form
of communication of
our times and the young
artist is no longer able
to move here and speak
to her time... Yes, I could,
but that was 15 years ago
and remember- as I must
I am a Kennedy.
Have you noticed that black children
generally are
photographed in groups. That's what I'm
told. White
photographers just have a hard time wrapping their minds around black kids as individuals. Unless one gets killed by a stray bullet or is like Taisha- this poet girl who got strangled with a phone cord because she didn't pay her cell phone bill to a neighborhood guy. Then the paper will carry an individual portrait. School picture or a snapshot. What's subliminally driven home is that a universe of invisible dangers awaits anybody of the underclass who leaves their group. Wanting more.
in the past twenty years or forty years- not much public thinking going on in this country (watch out, world!) outside the academy, itself a very expensive and disconnected finishing school for artists who indenture the next ten years of their lives gambling on the prospect of their art career paying out getting a gallery, selling a book so they don't have to sit with a bunch of losers wasting time sleepless working millions of hours a week to pay rent here in New York especially during their highly marketable youth while the government, Leviathan, fartingly collapses onto the vulnerable context of its own stupidity, the poor suffering world.
On the beach in the day and I hate her shitting in the dark as much as I used to love smoking. Loved seeing it weave. It's not the shit, it's the air. It's the colon. It's the opening. We're basking in language itself. The silence of my friend. My love. The one beyond words in her silence. She is always eternally before. When she speaks it is shit, a gift, something to do. In our moment of waiting, pointing, silent gear, what we went out for- *that* is pointing. Shit is the award. The award is shit.
What-pouring itself into the sea, vanishing into steam? There is no other place in the world, only this satisfied feeling. It was like a death, but a happy one. The sight is so intense. Just let it happen, Eileen. It wasn't boring. I stayed there for a long time, almost an hour. Then I needed to take the perfection somewhere else. The pleasant room in Hilo. I began.
I turned to the horizon, I headed that way. I saw a small house and those telltale piles of stone they call helau. Those little piles are holy. The house was the beginning of the road; there was my dark green rental car and my water and I drove out of the park and I had to get some caffeine, lots of it because I was falling asleep at the wheel. Everything was good after that, all three planes and especially now giving this account to you.
If I crawl inside of the head of a man, (and eat his thoughts alive) will I begin to live my life correctly. What will I do with the woman. Raymond Pettibone has one cartoon of a little girl with a gigantic mouth. The girl is all mouth. She is standing on a cliff with her mouth hanging open over a huge valley and she is yelling Va-voom. It's really great, but what does it mean. The little girl has so much power. She has overtaken the valley. All its emptiness, all of it is her. It is particularly strange because she is female and has a vagina. Hollow. She is a little crazy Hitler. Once someone looked at my hands, a palm reader, and she said you were born a megalomaniac. I said I know. But I got hurt. Yeah, she said, looking at me. You could rule the world. I took my hand back and paid her five bucks. For what?
It was like my love was god. I was used to loving god, I had grown up that way, having the idea of god help organize my life. And now when I didn't have god I knew how god felt, being fully occupied (with my singing) which I hadn't felt in a while. I mean in college I couldn't get over the possibilities of education. The amazing books and going on that way for years. And then I did. I couldn't stand things being open for too long. I had to let education die. I had done that and now I could live forever in poetry and love. That's what I felt. I was in love with Alice. If you can't tell someone you love them, and I never did, then depending on whether the person is kind, and Alice was fairly kind, you can just let. the colors of the love go wilder and deepen.
I remember Alice having a raspberry-colored scarf. She was like fruit on a tree. She wore a pea coat and her scarf looked great when her face got red and it was cold. She was very popular in the lesbian world at that time. I feel she had this great innocence. She was this tall thin cute boy. If a twenty-eight-year-old woman in puberty could be gangly, she was. It seems so young now. I don't know who I was in this communication, just kind of observing.
I was so relieved when Alice finally got a girlfriend. At last I could stop. I mean I was like a hungry dog, snooping around in the Duchess for her.
Sherri said, it is so butch. *Give me that word!*
The problem with imitating a poet is that you don't really know what they mean. Hopefully. But then you start to implicate their style in your confusion and next thing you know, you're parodying.
Let me also say that the other biggest problem for artists and writers and intellectuals in this country is everyone always making the world safe for children. The future is theirs etc. Meanwhile what they are actually doing is making the world separate for children. That's it. To my mind that is one very unsafe place. An institutional lie.
Favorite quotes:
She had this cute glint when she was being smart, which was always. She wasn't big smart, she didn't clobber you with words, she just kinda befriended us like wolves, but she believed that wolves were good, and could be taught, too.
Sometimes, in utter hopelessness, I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved.
"One person actually wrote a poem. Eileen, would you allow me to read it to the class?" There are moments when I felt literally drowned in life,
I loved to kiss- I loved to get lost in a drunk embrace [...] all the details of my life were in exact order, and yet I was tumbling in them, out of order like a wave had hit me
I believed that because I worked for things I was safe, meaning strong. To Abe, I just looked poor. To him I was some white female lump, to be bartered in this exchange
I loved how in college, you could just do nothing ...the golden age of college, three years ago. Sure, reading and writing my papers etcetera was good, and everything, but what was really great back then was how you could just suddenly decide to be a doctor. That's how it felt, you could join the peace corps, and you were thinking about it, you didn't have to do things, youdidn't have to change, so it was safe. ...I never had this before. And actually, I was terrified of it ending.
I mean if you do something and people see it, and they're impressed, it really seems you ought to be kind to them. But instead you wanna get away. Why?
Too damn nice was what it was. Being nice got scary in Padgett's hands, and then it got all innocent again,
He was exactly the friend that made me miss having friends.
Because rich people need poor friends (but not too poor!) to maintain their connection to the struggle that spawned them even if they never struggled. Poor people tend to know what's going on plus they are often good-looking, at least when they are young and even later they are cool interesting people the rich person once slept with, so the poor person always feathers the nests of the rich. If something bad happens to the poor person, the rich person would help. Everyone knows that. An artist's responsibility for a very long time is to get collected, socially.
We who write poetry [...] (being jammed with thin and irregularly shaped journals and books and people generally twenty or thirty) the stinking bars where poets meet and read in. In dozens even hundreds of stained and damp diaries the evidence accumulates, notebooks bent from getting shoved in back pockets, or written into during the long nights of the poet's youth (included here is the bonus time of people who managed to stay young extra long, till forty or fifty, sixty or seventy even, at last croaking then.)
Push my chair away, laughing. Here, try this.
In the sexual encounter of our lives (when your time is uncommodified, amateur, kid, punk, unobserved, over, before, days marked useless, private, unshipped, so to speak life stays in the swarm of free-range sex shifting into art, back to sex, art again. This is our belief.)
Bill Knott's was on warm vanilla paper, the type was bright red. The font was called Avant Garde.
It was called Poem to Myself:
The way the world is not
Astonished at you
It doesn't blink a leaf
Leads me to grop
That beauty is natural, unremarkable
&
I mean- if you were told that you could live that way- in a house entirely torn open, gutted. Something that doesn't so much rule the world, but generates it- well, what *would* you do?
The buildings were really close and the sun was hot and it was humid in a way that simply made you feel filthy, no matter how clean you were. Years later I learned to love it. Cause you'd go down into the subway and you'd think you were in hell. For some reason I liked that. Though it took years. I think you just need more experience to understand hell as something possibly good.
He was wearing a shirt I liked, a dark brown safari shirt with a lot of pockets. The woman who dumped him had given him this shirt. I just thought of love as travel. In your twenties you just kind of chug along, dredging up feelings as you go. It seemed like people then had a lot of feelings and you could get all bundled up like Eli had and brood with them for a while, or you could recoil entirely like I was doing (for professional reasons) and consider your behavior just art, grist for the mill.
We were so excited because the silence of our childhood was over. We wrote. We sat on the sidewalk outside of that house. We anticipated a response. We waited and waited. Then we simply forgot. But that sun, the first tiny symbol still sits there, blazing in my head.
the little girl who pops one right out, and as the not so old woman is moving her cigarette to her lipsticked mouth in the still heat of the New England summer, this kid. You're a hot ticket, Eileen. She just had to laugh. I had to make her.
People always looked like you hit them before they laughed, and that was the moment I loved to get- *without* violence. I would never hit a face. Yet I wanted it to be open a moment just for me.
The artist is sort of a child. Deliberately naive. Talkin dumb. Somebody stepped in regional kitsch. The artist pokes around, wastes a little time. Five years, ten. The artist must be entirely willing to live in the worst neighborhoods. Voluntarily the artist becomes poor and in that poverty she will begin to live in another time. A time outside of middle class America. The artist goes down to that other place for a while. Down like a roller coaster. Long enough to build a career.
We'll buy your house and your land when you're on the skids, when the fishing fails, then we'll build your children nice affordable housing. This is what's happening today in Wellfleet. The woman smiles. I hate lefties. I know. We don't want to live in affordable housing. I want your fucking house on the water.
A lot of romance is just the swapping of alibis.
The dancer standing there was like a big cookie. (A cookie I soon would be jamming my fist into.) We went upstairs. The light outside turned mauve while I was fucking her. Actually I'm not so good with having sex and writing about it (especially in a grant proposal), except to say it was great. It was really, really great. We had wonderful easy athletic sex.
What happened today. How could I be this much a stranger to the facts of my own existence.
The little dog followed me into rehearsals. The play hadn't even happened yet but I already imagined the summer that loomed as a gaping hole and now I had a friend to walk around its perimeter with. I will always remember the grass on First Avenue behind a chain link fence. The fence that surrounded those sort of nice housing projects on First. That look like they have huge amplifiers on the roof. Where Rose discovered grass. [...] she was like an old friend you go traveling with only to realize she is fluent in several languages she never mentioned to you before.
Looking at art is so hopeless. I mean if your life is falling apart.
I read every day till I was full- and anxious, which took a little less than an hour. Alone a person begins to know herself like a clock. I was a 43-year old calendar of shifting desire that summer.
reading must end and I couldn't bear my body anymore in its fake agreement with my mind, the body then vaulting over the mind's walls.
I guess they were seeing me. To write you get really alone. Now I had the sensation of having just landed or was dwelling in the softest space. It was this insane country living. Rarely does a lesbian, not this lesbian- rarely had I ever felt this cool. I was wearing this green shirt and my hair had grown into some condition of excess.
Like a spilt glass of milk, my life. A white pool shimmering on the floor. My corrupt womanhood: a waste. I feel the same way about being a writer. Staying up all night burning my brain cells, for years, swallowing cheap speed, also for years, writing poorly, pretty much drinking myself to death. And then not. Contracting whatever STD came to me in the seventies, eighties, nineties, smoking cigarettes, a couple a packs a day for at least twenty years, being poor and not ever really going to the doctor (only the dentist: flash teeth), wasting my time doing so little work, being truly dysfunctional, and on top of that, especially my point, being a dyke, in terms of the whole giant society, just a fogged human glass turned on its side. Yak yak yak a lesbian talking. And being rewarded for it. Not only wasted, but useless,
rancid, a wreck. It has come to me slow.
Nope, I am destroyed. A shattered boat of a person. A broken window here, a lousy bell there. An old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking a book. A drippy excrescence. A schmear.
You are the New Americans.
The homeless are wandering
the streets of our nation's
greatest city. Homeless
men with AIDs are among
them. Is that right?
That there are no homes
for the homeless, that
there is no free medical
help for these men. And women.
That they get the message
-as they are dying-
that this is not their home?
And how are your
teeth today? Can
you afford to fix them?
How high is your rent?
If art is the highest
and most honest form
of communication of
our times and the young
artist is no longer able
to move here and speak
to her time... Yes, I could,
but that was 15 years ago
and remember- as I must
I am a Kennedy.
Have you noticed that black children
generally are
photographed in groups. That's what I'm
told. White
photographers just have a hard time wrapping their minds around black kids as individuals. Unless one gets killed by a stray bullet or is like Taisha- this poet girl who got strangled with a phone cord because she didn't pay her cell phone bill to a neighborhood guy. Then the paper will carry an individual portrait. School picture or a snapshot. What's subliminally driven home is that a universe of invisible dangers awaits anybody of the underclass who leaves their group. Wanting more.
in the past twenty years or forty years- not much public thinking going on in this country (watch out, world!) outside the academy, itself a very expensive and disconnected finishing school for artists who indenture the next ten years of their lives gambling on the prospect of their art career paying out getting a gallery, selling a book so they don't have to sit with a bunch of losers wasting time sleepless working millions of hours a week to pay rent here in New York especially during their highly marketable youth while the government, Leviathan, fartingly collapses onto the vulnerable context of its own stupidity, the poor suffering world.
On the beach in the day and I hate her shitting in the dark as much as I used to love smoking. Loved seeing it weave. It's not the shit, it's the air. It's the colon. It's the opening. We're basking in language itself. The silence of my friend. My love. The one beyond words in her silence. She is always eternally before. When she speaks it is shit, a gift, something to do. In our moment of waiting, pointing, silent gear, what we went out for- *that* is pointing. Shit is the award. The award is shit.
What-pouring itself into the sea, vanishing into steam? There is no other place in the world, only this satisfied feeling. It was like a death, but a happy one. The sight is so intense. Just let it happen, Eileen. It wasn't boring. I stayed there for a long time, almost an hour. Then I needed to take the perfection somewhere else. The pleasant room in Hilo. I began.
I turned to the horizon, I headed that way. I saw a small house and those telltale piles of stone they call helau. Those little piles are holy. The house was the beginning of the road; there was my dark green rental car and my water and I drove out of the park and I had to get some caffeine, lots of it because I was falling asleep at the wheel. Everything was good after that, all three planes and especially now giving this account to you.
If I crawl inside of the head of a man, (and eat his thoughts alive) will I begin to live my life correctly. What will I do with the woman. Raymond Pettibone has one cartoon of a little girl with a gigantic mouth. The girl is all mouth. She is standing on a cliff with her mouth hanging open over a huge valley and she is yelling Va-voom. It's really great, but what does it mean. The little girl has so much power. She has overtaken the valley. All its emptiness, all of it is her. It is particularly strange because she is female and has a vagina. Hollow. She is a little crazy Hitler. Once someone looked at my hands, a palm reader, and she said you were born a megalomaniac. I said I know. But I got hurt. Yeah, she said, looking at me. You could rule the world. I took my hand back and paid her five bucks. For what?
It was like my love was god. I was used to loving god, I had grown up that way, having the idea of god help organize my life. And now when I didn't have god I knew how god felt, being fully occupied (with my singing) which I hadn't felt in a while. I mean in college I couldn't get over the possibilities of education. The amazing books and going on that way for years. And then I did. I couldn't stand things being open for too long. I had to let education die. I had done that and now I could live forever in poetry and love. That's what I felt. I was in love with Alice. If you can't tell someone you love them, and I never did, then depending on whether the person is kind, and Alice was fairly kind, you can just let. the colors of the love go wilder and deepen.
I remember Alice having a raspberry-colored scarf. She was like fruit on a tree. She wore a pea coat and her scarf looked great when her face got red and it was cold. She was very popular in the lesbian world at that time. I feel she had this great innocence. She was this tall thin cute boy. If a twenty-eight-year-old woman in puberty could be gangly, she was. It seems so young now. I don't know who I was in this communication, just kind of observing.
I was so relieved when Alice finally got a girlfriend. At last I could stop. I mean I was like a hungry dog, snooping around in the Duchess for her.
Sherri said, it is so butch. *Give me that word!*
The problem with imitating a poet is that you don't really know what they mean. Hopefully. But then you start to implicate their style in your confusion and next thing you know, you're parodying.
Let me also say that the other biggest problem for artists and writers and intellectuals in this country is everyone always making the world safe for children. The future is theirs etc. Meanwhile what they are actually doing is making the world separate for children. That's it. To my mind that is one very unsafe place. An institutional lie.
neurodivengeance's review against another edition
4.0
This book was difficult to shelve and will be difficult to review cos I don't really know how to pin it down! I thought it was great mostly. I underlined lots of little phrases that made my brain go all wiggly. I found the wandering narrative challenging at times but it was the kind of challenging that was ok. It was like Art and Lies in that way, except millions better (and with more linguistic pay-offs). Obviously I also have a crush on Eileen Myles, and I want to read more of her stuff (and know her Sun sign, why is this information so unavailable?!).
interrobang's review against another edition
4.0
this is such a good read for a time in my life where I am trying to figure out how to be a poet. here are some quotations I like from it about poetry so I can save them and also return this to the library because it's due tomorrow:
p. 52: "Poetry readings were like early teevee in that everyone had their own little show. Though teevee got more sophisticated (worse) poetry never did. It remains stupid, run by fools. It's the only way to hold it open."
p. 108: "I mean and I would definitely say poetry is a very roundabout way to unite both work and time. A poet is a person with a very short attention span who actually decides to study it. To look. To draw that short thing out."
p. 224 (a comparison to Hart Crane) "There's one picture of me when I was thirteen sitting with my friends and I was doing it. Looking through the camera, back at myself but pleased. Usually the other people in the picture actually seem to be in the world. They're stopping the balloon from floating off."
(and I think I marked this because it resembles my favorite line in Wittgenstein's Mistress: "All that looking compressed in a poem."
p. 261: "The poem was a grid– that swayed and moving through it you just picked up things and hung them on the grid all the while singing your broken heart out. Humming. It was a deep deep grey. In that place (and poetry most of all is a mastery of places, not the world but the weather of the states that form in your life and what you read and how things were taken and what came back) each of these series of occurrences creates a season. The seasons grow huge (til they die) and in each you create a new sense of what the poem is in relation to the space of your mind, heart, that kind of substance."
p. 52: "Poetry readings were like early teevee in that everyone had their own little show. Though teevee got more sophisticated (worse) poetry never did. It remains stupid, run by fools. It's the only way to hold it open."
p. 108: "I mean and I would definitely say poetry is a very roundabout way to unite both work and time. A poet is a person with a very short attention span who actually decides to study it. To look. To draw that short thing out."
p. 224 (a comparison to Hart Crane) "There's one picture of me when I was thirteen sitting with my friends and I was doing it. Looking through the camera, back at myself but pleased. Usually the other people in the picture actually seem to be in the world. They're stopping the balloon from floating off."
(and I think I marked this because it resembles my favorite line in Wittgenstein's Mistress: "All that looking compressed in a poem."
p. 261: "The poem was a grid– that swayed and moving through it you just picked up things and hung them on the grid all the while singing your broken heart out. Humming. It was a deep deep grey. In that place (and poetry most of all is a mastery of places, not the world but the weather of the states that form in your life and what you read and how things were taken and what came back) each of these series of occurrences creates a season. The seasons grow huge (til they die) and in each you create a new sense of what the poem is in relation to the space of your mind, heart, that kind of substance."
octavia_cade's review against another edition
3.0
I don't really know what I was expecting when I picked this up. It's got an interesting premise, and though it's ostensibly a novel it reads more like memoir. It's hard not to think that this novel about a poet isn't influenced by the life of the poet who wrote it. Granted, I wasn't familiar with Myles before this, so I don't know how much of this comes from real life and how much is made up out of whole cloth, but I suspect it's weighted heavily to the former.
And, you know, I enjoyed it. I don't think it's anything particularly startling - a novel structured after a poem and presented in a disjointed, interesting sort of way, but for all I get the feeling that Myles and Inferno are supposed to be confronting and perhaps uncomfortable, a wee bit shocking, I just found it mildly pleasant. Some of that's down to plot, I suppose - it hits every note you'd expect of a young poet trying to make it in New York (not that I've ever been a young poet trying to make it in New York, or even known one, but you do sort of absorb expectations of an artistic urban life almost by osmosis.) Most of my enjoyment, however, is due to the language, which if not always to my taste - I prefer prose with a bit more lyricism to it - slips down so easily, almost seamlessly. As I said: pleasant, and I don't mean that in a negative way. I read it in sunshine and it suited the day.
And, you know, I enjoyed it. I don't think it's anything particularly startling - a novel structured after a poem and presented in a disjointed, interesting sort of way, but for all I get the feeling that Myles and Inferno are supposed to be confronting and perhaps uncomfortable, a wee bit shocking, I just found it mildly pleasant. Some of that's down to plot, I suppose - it hits every note you'd expect of a young poet trying to make it in New York (not that I've ever been a young poet trying to make it in New York, or even known one, but you do sort of absorb expectations of an artistic urban life almost by osmosis.) Most of my enjoyment, however, is due to the language, which if not always to my taste - I prefer prose with a bit more lyricism to it - slips down so easily, almost seamlessly. As I said: pleasant, and I don't mean that in a negative way. I read it in sunshine and it suited the day.
veraspoonie's review against another edition
challenging
funny
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5