'the biggest difference is I was queer and really wanted to write about it.'

Eileen Myles on why she didn’t get involved with the language poets: (highlights below)

"I think the biggest difference is I was queer and really wanted to write about it. If you look today in the piano bar chronicles about language writing there really isn’t much sex. And they were having sex. They were young. They had to be. They just didn’t like writing about it and for me, aesthetically that is a problem. There was a whole revolution in San Francisco which created New Narrative Writing which was I think about people on the poetry scene wanting to be engaged with excess and sex and narrative particularly as AIDS reared its head – I have to ask where is the great language poem about AIDS, how could you watch so many people die and not write about it? I’ve always thought of AIDS as the Vietnam of my generation. A war needs its poets and we were absolutely there. John Ashbery did it in his John Ashbery way. And I think Language writing did not see that as its job. For that alone I have to stand in resistance to thinking of Language writing as what happened in poetry in the seventies and eighties.

To advance our poetics we have to go back. I think I’m allowed to say this because these poets are my friends (or they were) and this is what we do right, a discourse, and I’m trying to make room for other histories as we’re wallpapering the past we have to know there were many more than one. The explanation isn’t happening here. And also despite the fact that this conference is taking place in the academy I think we also must know that as artists we have to always take the academy with a grain of salt. It’s a resource, it’s a workplace, it’s many things. It’s a patron. It’s something we’re in cahoots with. But it can’t be the ground of the poetry world. It’s not in here."