Thank you.
[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]
All right.
All right, everybody.
Hello, hello.
Welcome, welcome.
It's a full house.
And as the late great José Muñoz would say,
these lights are homophobic.
[LAUGHTER]
But I digress.
It's incredible to be here.
It's nice to wear two long-sleeve shirts together.
And we did it.
We survived another summer here in Tucson.
So for everyone that stayed in town, God bless you all.
God has blessed you all.
All right.
So think of this introduction as my--
as a queer, as our queer, to Sir, with love.
Eileen Myles has saved many of our lives.
And for me, I too am a former--
or a survivor Catholic school kid.
And so it's hard not to think of Eileen
as a patron saint of language, the language of desire,
the language of self-formation.
I've learned, I've gleaned from reading this work--
and you may have too--
that lust for a queer touch could also
be the same energizing force that we
can harness to call out impunity and rage
against the systems that thrive on the backs
of the dispossessed.
It was Eileen's prose that got me first.
I arrived to Chelsea Girls with much gusto.
Saying that you own the Black Sparrow edition of Chelsea
Girls is equivalent to saying you
went to the first Coachella, which I did.
[LAUGHTER]
It is a text that exemplifies resistance to genre convention.
It's proof that we could loosen the straps of our captivity,
to do away with policing ourselves,
policing each other, that we could live, risk,
fuck, and fail fantastically on our own terms.
Thank you, Eileen.
For me, Eileen Myles is a true avatar of genre promiscuity
and has modeled for me, for many of us,
a way of being in this world through dogged persistence
and giving back to your communities.
To be an artery in your creative ecosystem,
to give, to give, to give.
And then you will maybe get-- you give what you get.
You get what you give.
In this terrible deadly world, in this world,
we all continue to inhabit and push against
and desire for its necessary transformation.
Eileen Myles' words bully me into, again,
what José Muñoz would call, a radical condition
of possibility.
Eileen Myles is here tonight to read poems
from a "Working Life," which I believe is her 25th book.
Not many of us can say that.
So it's amazing.
25 publications, 25 texts, 25 books, everyone.
Here in these poems reside many of my favorite things.
So thank you for that.
Dogs, Texas, big skies, coffee, friendship, and desire, or what
it means to live meaningfully under late capitalism.
Please join me in welcoming Eileen Myles
to the Poetry Center.
[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]