Eileen Myles Reads James Schuyler (and Chats with Paul Muldoon)

                  

The New Yorker’s Poetry Podcast asks poets who have published in the New Yorker to choose a poem from the New Yorker’s pages, read it, and discuss it with poetry editor Paul Muldoon, before reading one of their own poems that has appeared in the magazine.

The most recent edition offers a treat: Eileen Myles reads a poem by James Schuyler and talks with Muldoon about Schuyler’s poetry and her sense of the New York School and its lasting significance.

As Myles explains, Schuyler was already something of a hero to her when she first became immersed in the New York scene, even before she (famously) worked as his assistant when he lived at the Hotel Chelsea in the late 1970s.  (Myles memorably wrote about her experience working for Schuyler in the title story of her celebrated collection Chelsea Girls).

On the podcast, Myles talks with Muldoon about her affection for Schuyler’s work and her strong identification with the poetry of the New York School, and reminisces about her exciting early days in the 1970s East Village poetry scene that centered on the Poetry Project at St. Marks, when rents were cheap, downtown was still a haven for writers and musicians, and poetry flowed like wine (or amphetamines, or something).

She then reads Schuyler’s late poem “White Boat, Blue Boat” (which appeared in the New Yorker in 1989), followed by a poem of her own, “Dissolution,” which just appeared in the magazine in August.

You can hear the podcast here, and you can read some of my own recent work on Schuyler here, and in my recently published book, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture.