Eileen Myles, Inferno, (A Poet's Novel) Lo Galluccio Eileen starts out in @ world literature class in Boston, led by a nun named Eva Nelson. She had “fantastic breasts” that sometimes featured a medallion dividing them. She introduces the class to Dante's Inferno and delegates the class an assignment to write a paper on it. Myles writes: ‘Dante really had no other way to talk about his time except in a poem. The inferno is really a heavily coded poem. It's not about censorship but something else. It was an age of not even satire but allegory. His beliefs were fixed in the structure of his poem like the windows of a church. Her eyes twinkled. Oh my god p. 9. ‘And Eva: "I want each of you to write an Inferno. The class groaned. It's just his time. This is yours. She smiled.” And Eileen, "It was ours now. | would show her my hell.” p 10. Myles lived in Arlington and worked many different odd jobs in Boston. She was the one in the class who turned in a poem for the Inferno ~instead of everybody else's essay -and Eva read it aloud to the class which pleases Eileen and seems auspicious for her decision to pursue poetry as a career. And clearly this scene is where we get the title of this novel. Eileen remarks: “If you did something special then time would stop and you could dream. The thing | hated growing up was that everyone wanted you to wake up and pay attention.” p12 In an early chapter called, “The Honeymooners" Myles introduces her teevee world, from which she plucks examples of how people in America live. Fascinated by New York City, she's drawn to the show because Jackie Gleason and Alice live in a dark apartment in there. Then she's on the Upper West Side living with a girl named Alice herself. She was tapped into a lesbian network that funded its activities by selling subway slugs. Things take a turn when a guy asks Myles if she wants to get pregnant and have a baby that could be sold for $15,000. ‘She responds, “I waitressed my way to Europe and North Africa. I'm not a girl traveling on graduation money her grandparents gave her. | didn’t even have grandparents. | believed 24that because | worked for things | was safe. Meaning strong. To Abe | just looked poor. To him | was like some white female lump to be bartered in this gross exchange.” p 28, Myles has a fantastic mind for details — this book about her becoming a poet in NYC has lots of mental footage of the avant-garde poetry scene in the 80s and early 90s when it was both raucous and meditative. In the early chapters of the book she sets up herself in NYC, working crazy odd jobs, meeting and falling for lovers, exploring her sexuality and deciding upon being queer, for the most part. Toward the middle of the book ~- the “abstract” or Purgatorio art, she’s m_ oving through the scene, dropping names and raising what would seem like gossip to a new literary height. There is always the metaphor that twists and enlightens. But sometimes it's just too much, an avalanche of experience from which the reader feels buried or Not able to Keep pace. But this style grew on me as the book moved into the later phases, and that last one called, "Heaven." The book moves back and forth in time, beginning and ending several times. There are moments when Eileen captures the tenor of her relationship to others on the scene, like a couple named Eden and Gato whose farm in the country she stays at, with her dog Rosie. Usually Eileen is the underdog though sometimes, later in her career, she’s the poet star often opening or closing poetry readings on the lower east side and elsewhere. She had a great run with her Kennedy poem—called “An American Poem’ which is published in full, in the middle section of the book. The irony is that she is so not a Kennedy but is sort of putting on the airs as a gag, a masquerade. “Are you a friend of Eden and Cato’s they asked and watched my face like animals. The answer was yes but because of my tom clothes (look at her car!) it didn't matter how | replied. | was a liar... maybe my best equivalent was the lonely black swan taking its interminable loops in the pond..." p. 164 25Myles leaves out commas and semi-colons a lot. Her syntax is conversational and cooly poetic. ‘She comes out with this revelation about the situation of poetry: “So in the awards department it's worse than art. No poetry-driven economy. No critical machinery. There's just no thing at all. Which could be Zen but instead it's entirely the opposite. I's so symbolic.” p 165 Eileen has a strong narrative voice in this “novel” which is really a memoir for all intents and purposes. She can be cynical, funny, brash and powerful. There's a chapter pretty much devoted to the details of different clits she’s massaged or licked. She uses sexual encounters as fuel and devotion to a passion for hands on love. But there is unrequited love and metaphysical love as well in these pages. She usually sides with the underdog recounting that when Allen Ginsberg was dying he wrote to President Ciinton in the hope that his work would be formally recognized. He never heard back. She posits because Ginsberg was queer and Jewish... but he was also a beat and positioned outside society. Yet Myles points out that when waspy Robert Lowell passed on, there was much fanfare and hand-wringing in the elite echelon. So Myles writes a poem about Lowell's death ‘Oh, | don't give a shit He was an old white haired man Insensate beyond belief and Filled with much anxiety about his imagined Paris. Not that I'd know hate fucking wasps.... (Myles) (On her own book, she says: “This proposal is a guidebook. It follows the utter singularity of my entire writing career. The shape of my writing forces you through it. P 169 She writes lovingly about her dog Rosie, who she picked out as a very young pup. Rosie performs with her at times and keeps her company on the farm she’s holed up in for much of the 26latter part of the book. In one episode Rose kills. a hedgehog and Eileen looks on with fascination and admiration. ‘She goes to Hawaii, which she worries is more a tevee thing than a real place, having watched Hawaii Five-O. But when she gets there she opts to hike to an erupting volcano, a four hour hike in the dark, and describes it thusly “I got there. And it was fabulous. Immediately three eruptions of hot red lava went bursting into the sea, lots of steam — but there had been one still and frightening moment just earlier — as | approached the precipice of the volcano.” p 177. She sleeps on the edge of a cliff in a buggy barely moon-lit night and wakes up early to head back. She is satisfied with the experience. Myles circles back on certain experiences, of course we wouldn't expect a linear narrative from a poetic memoir especially a form loosely based on Dante's Inferno. “I became a lesbian in NY. It was my ‘st or 2nd career. It was wrecking my poetry as Jong as | didn't know what it was. Alice showed up and she was my romantic ideal. She was a witch and she scared me.” p 184 Another revelation about her passion for poetry: “Poetry (and this is why | love it and will until | die) always winds up being the conga line between random chaos and it. It being the real monster moving up the coast. The norm” p 197 Later she says that she has trouble knowing when to leave parties, and that deciding when to leave is like finishing a poem, just walking out of the room and feeling it done. She writes about Hart Crane's work, noting that he and Charlie Chaplin used to go out on the town together: “Imagine some party where Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin stroll in.” p 249. And then, “| don't ‘think you were supposed to become as steeped in your material as | did with Hart. | attached my homosexual poet to him and took a ride...” p 250. aThese kind of artistic connections are really finely drawn in this book, which is still deliberately slap-dash, sort of trash and vaudeville about the time she came of age in, parading flash-pan moments and characters in many scenes and situations. You come to love the way it's all pretty entertaining and jarring and cool. On writing Eileen Myles says: “Writing is just what | do to frame my longing. | replace myself. The longer | live the deeper it goes. It seems it will never end this feeling. | throw a stone down and nothing ever comes up | don't even get circles.” p. 255 In the book's final chapter called, “Moving” she writes: If passion was a substance | would say it is dark brown and then blood red. It's like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It's warm and it stinks like shit and it’s unaccountably and endlessly good. It's thick and it goes on for miles and it isn’t so much deep as. bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. That's all you know. (Myles) This book goes on and on, rambling and chatting and communing and fucking and performing....it's too much but at the end you feel like you've had a pretty amazing meal, that Eileen Myles has guided you through a zoo of crazed and fascinating folk—on the wild side— mostly folks who write and perform poetry. She answered her calling and she never gave up looking around at the crowd and taking notes on it. She never gave up on wanting deep and brave connections, 28