Eileen Myles in discussion with Ros Prosser

Referred to by the Boston Globe as a rock star of poetry, Eileen Myles is one of the most powerful counter-cultural voices of her generation and has been shaking up the establishment with her personal and vernacular style of poetry, essays, plays and prose for over three decades. Join us at the Bakehouse Theatre, 255 Angas St, Adelaide, as Myles reads from her work and discusses its ongoing relevance. This is one event not to be missed.

Saturday 28 May. 7.30 for an 8pm start.

Organised by Rosslyn Prosser and Alison Coppe as a continuation of the Experimental Writing Symposium 2015 for the Department of English and Creative Writing, School of Humanities, and supported by the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.

Biography:

Poet, novelist, performer and art journalist Eileen Myles is the author of nineteen books including I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems and a re-issue of Chelsea Girls in 2015. Eileen Myles graduated from the University of Massachusetts (Boston) in 1971 and came to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Her poetic education primarily took place at St. Mark's Poetry Project from 1975 to 1977, through attending readings and participating in workshops led by Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, and Paul Violi. From 1984 to 1986 Myles was the artistic director of St. Mark's Poetry Project.

From 1977 to 1979 they published dodgems, a poetry magazine that represented a collision of New York School, Language Poetry, performance texts, unconventional prose, as well as tossed-off notes from neighbors and celebrities. In 1977, Eileen co-edited the feminist anthology Ladies Museum, and in 1979 worked as an assistant to poet James Schuyler. That same year, Eileen Myles was a founding member of the Los Texans Collective (along with Elinor Nauen and Barbara McKay), which went on to produce the play Patriarchy and the spiritual entertainment Joan of Arc.

Myles has toured and read all over North America and Europe on and off since the early 1980s. Solo performances include Leaving New York (1989), Life (1991), and Summer in Russia (1996) at PS 788 in New York. Myles’s plays include Feeling Blue (Parts 1, 2, and 3) and Our Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, written for Alina Troyano. In 2004, Eileen Myles wrote the libretto for the opera Hell, composed by Michael Webster. In 2010, they created and directed their Dia Center for the Arts performance piece, The Collection of Silence, which involved dancers, poets, children, visual artists, and Buddhists in a collective public act of silence at the Hispanic Society in New York.

Myles’s other books include Snowflake/different streets (2012), Inferno: A Poet's Novel ( 2010), The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009), Sorry, Tree (2007), Tow (2005, with artist Larry R. Collins), Skies (2001), on my way (2001), Cool for You (novel, 2000), School of Fish (1997), Maxfied Parrish (1995), Not Me (1991), and Chelsea Girls (1994). In 1995, with Liz Kotz, Myles edited The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading.

Eileen Myles is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in non-fiction, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the PSA, was named to the Slate/Whiting Second Novel List in 2015, and received a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, she received both a Creative Capital grant for nonfiction and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing.

Tickets are available at the door. $10 or $5 concession. To RSVP and for further information contact alison.coppe@adelaide.edu.au.