Uncanny Eileen Myles Jerry Harp (bio) On I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975–2014 For an American poet, Eileen Myles has had some amazingly popular success. The second season of the web TV series Transparent features a character based on Myles, the poet Leslie Mackinaw, played by Cherry Jones, who said in a New York Times interview, “I’m not really playing Eileen; I could never capture the charisma of Ms. Myles” (Jan. 1 2016). Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine anyone quite matching Myles’s personality. Myles herself also appears in the second season, speaks some half a dozen lines, and effectively steals every scene she’s in. She’s somehow deadpan and effervescent at once; and her beautiful, chiseled features, with touches of David Bowie, would stand out in a crowd of Greek deities. When I saw her giving a reading in Portland, her right hand waving as if conducting a hidden orchestra as she performed in her working-class Boston accent, it was impossible to look away. One scene of Transparent features Gaby Hoffman (who plays Ali) reading Myles’s “I always put my pussy,” a kind of anthem to the unfettered female body: I always put my pussy in the middle of trees like a waterfall like a doorway to God like a flock of birds I always put my lover’s cunt on the crest of a wave like a flag that I can pledge my allegiance to. This is my country. This is all characteristic of Myles’s work: the frankness about sexuality and desire, along with the pussy-to-trees-to-waterfall-to-God leaps, suggesting that all are intertwined and that one becomes aware of their connections with simple modulations of awareness. It’s also an invocation of the deep relationship between sexuality and the sacred, one of the many themes that she shares with the Beats, along with several centuries’ worth of mystical writers. She is quite serious in her talk of the divine. In a transcribed conversation with the actor Daniel Day-Lewis in 1990, she talked about her shifting relationship to belief: “I bumped up against religion again some years later, and took it on when I would take anything on. Then I just started to think, ‘Maybe I do believe.’ I like praying” (The Importance of Being Iceland, 2009). It’s a sense of the sacred that has stayed with her. In her recent Paris Review interview, she spoke unabashedly about poetry in its relationship to the realms of the holy: What is so great—I’ll even say holy—about reading a poem for the first time in front of people is that you’re sharing what you felt in the moment of composition, when you were allowing something…. Writing is all performance. Something’s passing through. When people talk about formal constraints that’s just technology, that’s fashion. I like fashion, but you keep adjusting those things to let the other thing happen. The performance is us writing what’s using us, remarking upon it. Whatever she might want to call this something “passing through,” she works to remain open to its invitations, taking advantage of the speed of her often short lines as she writes them into the notebooks that she carries. In her poetry as spiritual practice, she represents one strain of thought in what has come to be [End Page 16] known as our “post-secular” era. Although “post-secular” sometimes refers to the resurgence of fundamentalist belief, it also refers to varieties of renewed and open-ended interest in theology and the divine, exemplified by such journals as Image and Ruminate and such cultural critics as Terry Eagleton (Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, 2009; Culture and the Death of God, 2014), Gianni Vattimo (Belief, 1999), and Slavoj Žižek (God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse, 2012), none of whom exemplifies fundamentalist zeal. For Myles, speaking of this “other thing” happening through us, it apparently matters little whether one calls it God, the numinous, the absolute other, ground of all being, universal energy, realm of ultimate concern, or chthonic forces. Her commitment of openness...