Eileen Myles - Pathetic Literature

PATHETIC LITERATURE

Also by Eileen Myles

For Now

Evolution

Afterglow (a dog memoir)

I Must Be Living Twice / New and Selected Poems, 19752014

Snowflake / different streets

Inferno (a poets novel)

The Importance of Being Iceland / travel essays in art

Sorry, Tree

Tow (with drawings by artist Larry R. Collins)

Skies

on my way

Cool for You

School of Fish

Maxfield Parrish / Early & New Poems

The New Fuck You / Adventures in Lesbian Reading (with Liz Kotz)

Chelsea Girls

Not Me

1969

Bread and Water

Sapphos Boat

A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains

Polar Ode (with Anne Waldman)

The Irony of the Leash

PATHETIC LITERATURE

AN ANTHOLOGY

EDITED BY

EILEEN MYLES

Grove Press

New York

Introduction and After Words Copyright 2022 by Eileen Myles

All other copyright information listed in the credits on page 639

Jacket artwork: Nicole Eisenman, Tail End, 2021. Nicole Eisenman.

Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Thomas Barratt

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or .

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: November 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-5715-7

eISBN 978-0-8021-5717-1

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

for East River Park

and everyone who played

there, who lived and landed and

leapt through the branches

of its trees, its trees

and the activists

who sat there too

on the coldest

morning ever

Contents

by Eileen Myles

by Alice Notley

by Gwendolyn Brooks

by The Friend

by Kevin Killian

by Ama Birch

by Andrea Dworkin

by Ariana Reines

Excerpt from by Bob Flanagan

by Baha Ebdeir

by Bob Kaufman

by Brandon Shimoda

Excerpt from by Bruce Benderson

and My Faggot Blood on His Fist by CAConrad

by Camille Roy

by Can Xue

Excerpt from by Carmen Boullosa

Excerpt from by Chantal Akerman

by Charles Bernstein

Excerpt from by Chester Himes

Excerpt from by Chris Kraus

Excerpt from by Dana Ward

by Dara Barrois/Dixon

Excerpt from by Dennis Cooper

Excerpt from e by Dodie Bellamy

Excerpts from by Djuna Barnes

by Eileen Myles

and Boulder/Meteor by essa may ranapiri

Excerpts from by Etel Adnan

and A Vision by Fanny Howe

by Fred Moten

by Gail Scott

Excerpt from by Franz Kafka

Excerpt from by Georg Bchner

Excerpt from by J. R. Ackerley

by Jack Halberstam

by James Schuyler

by Frank B. Wilderson III

Excerpt from by James Welch

. by Jerome Sala

by Joe Proulx

by Joan Larkin

(or How I Caught HIV: Version 4; Fall 1983) by Joe Westmoreland

by Jocelyn Saidenberg

by The Cyborg Jillian Weise

Selections from by John Wieners

by Jorge Luis Borges

by Judy Grahn

by Justin Torres

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

by Andrea Abi-Karam

Excerpt from by Kathy Acker

by Layli Long Soldier

Excerpt from by Keith Waldrop

by Kim Hyesoon

Excerpt from by Kristn marsdttir

, God Gives You What You Can Handle, and The Only Good by Laura Henriksen

Excerpt from by Laurence Sterne

Excerpt from by Lawrence Braithwaite

by Laurie Weeks

and slave cabin, sotterly plantation, maryland, 1989 by Lucille Clifton

Excerpt from by Lynne Tillman

Excerpt from by Maan Abu Taleb

Selections from by Maggie Nelson

by Marcella Durand

Excerpt from by Matthew Stadler

, Flower Garland Froth, and Fleshy Nave by Michael McClure

by Michelle Tea

, untitled 8, 5 years old, and untitled 2by Mira Gonzalez

, People Like Monsters, How to, and Great by Morgan V

by Moyra Davey

by Natalie Diaz

Excerpts from by Nate Lippens

and think of the words as angels singing in your vagina, she said by Akilah Oliver

by Porochista Khakpour

by Nicole Wallace

by Qiu Miaojin

by Rae Armantrout

by Rebecca Brown

Selection from by Renee Gladman

by Rose Rosebud Feliu-Pettet

by Robert Walser

by Robert Glck

, I see you and I am getting closer, and Strain by Sallie Fullerton

by Rumi

by Saidiya Hartman

Excerpt from by Samuel Beckett

Excerpt from by Samuel R. Delany

Selections from by Sei Shnagon

Excerpt from by Sergio Chejfec

by Simone Weil

by Simone White

by Precious Okoyomon

by Sophie Robinson

and Lincolns Lost Speech by Sparrow

and Inez, When Someone Tells You Youre a Bitch by Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz

by Susie Timmons

by Tim Johnson and Mark So

Selections from by Valerie Solanas

by Steve Carey

Excerpt from by Violette Leduc

Selection from by Tom Cole

by Victoria Chang

and Pass by Tongo Eisen-Martin

Excerpts from by Victor Hugo

, Awake, Body, and Orlando by Will Farris

by Eileen Myles

In general poems are pathetic and diaries are pathetic. Really Literature is pathetic. Ask anyone who doesnt care about literature. They would agree. If they bothered at all.

Perhaps the only accomplishment here is Im saying that as an insider. This book is a kind of hollow. All these pieces of the rock (meaning Literature) long and short are just what I like. The invention of pathetic literature surely is Sei Shnagons The Pillow Book. More than a thousand years ago she kept her diaries, her interminable and adorable lists, her sovereignty to herself. Being discovered, she admits, kind of ruined things.

In light of our different pace Id say were ready for ruin.

I need to start this book at the beginning which is to say how I landed on pathetic as a badge of distinction. In the late twentieth century there was a movement in visual arts known briefly as Pathetic Masculinity that has since vanished as a genre and simply became part of what we know. What exemplified pathetic art then was an orientation to crafts, to feeling, to the handmade and diaristic. It was kind of dykey. Using cuddly and abject stuff like stuffed animals rather than producing work that was determinedly abstract. There was a readymade aspect to a lot of it. And it wasnt just any stuffed rabbit, it was the one you carried with you for all twenty-eight years of your childhood and now even to look at it produces trauma so the objects had secondary meaning too. Which is how it got to be art. And I have to say that pathetic art really pissed me off. Right out of the gate it resembled feminism. I mean give credit where credit is due! Feminist artists had long been appropriating craftsnot to be natural as the late Mike Kelley once said in an interview (as opposed to his own ironic use of similar materials) but to deliberately hijack the production of doilies and hand-sewn cushions and knowhow away from the den of the patriarchal family in order to pump up the pleasure in collective womens spaces and community activism.