A conversation with Eileen Myles for Apartamento magazine issue #37

Yeah. I mean, unless I have to leave the country. I came here for Lannan [Residency Fellowship] in 2015. I had never been to Marfa, so I did have the, ‘Oh my God, what a weird, perfect place’ feeling. This is too much of a story, but my mother was dying in Western Mass at the time, and I like it out there. I was thinking, Western Mass, I’ll buy a house there, but it’s really expensive—East Coast and heating. I bought this house in the same month that I came here for residency.

I’m not always that decisive, but this is the place. The house next door, there was a going-away party there, and this house was empty and a little abandoned looking. We were walking around the yard trying to look in the house, and I was thinking, this would be fine. I had met Mary Farley, this real estate person, but she’s very art world and was married to Matthew Barney. I asked Mary to show me some houses, and the next morning, this is the first place she took me to.

It’s great. All the ceilings were kind of low, so I had to tell the crew of guys to vault the ceilings a few times before they did it. I also cut out these windows between rooms so the house would not feel dinky. I knew I didn’t need privacy, and it’s good because I don’t really encourage guests.
I was single at the time, and I’m always a two-year, four-year relationship person. I’ve never gotten past four and a half years with anybody. I’ve had houses with girlfriends, but I wanted to have a house that was beyond relationships. So that was what I thought when I bought this place, and it’s really been that. I mean, I have had girlfriends here, but not living here. 

He’s great. He’s a Chinati [Foundation] artist, Porfirio Gutiérrez. He’s Zapotec. That was the year of the two eclipses. I’m going to keep dragging you through because the art tour is really fun. That’s Etel Adnan, are you a fan?

That’s a boat in the water. I think she was obsessed with them. I had the really good fortune to meet her in Paris and have lunch just before she died, and she gave me this. If we want to go outside, there’s a little deck we can sit on at the shack out here.

It is, it is.

At some point, somebody was like, ‘Eileen, do you realise you’ve duplicated your East Village apartment in here?’ I was like, ‘Oh my God’. It’s smaller, but not that much smaller.
And that, of course, is van Gogh. It’s so funny that I have this reproduction of [The] Starry Night. But yeah, the reason it’s there is so great and sad. I bought it for my mother when I was in high school. There was a foreign language bookstore in Harvard Square called Schoenhof, which is very famous, and my mother loved the painting so much. It was in the house I grew up in, and when she left the house and went into senior centres, she brought it to each place, and she died underneath it.

They seem like extensions of each other. They’re not that different. Here we’re sitting outside, and in New York, I live in a small space; it almost seems propulsive. You have to go outside. No matter what writing schedule I’ve been on, it generally doesn’t work because I get so excited about who’s there. I’m always wanting to be like Beckett, the unavailable artist. You can’t ever talk to Beckett, you know? But I get a lot of energy from my friendships and relationships and conversations. My apartment in New York is very womb-like, in a way, and it’s fun to stay in because you’re kind of safe. My apartment faces a cemetery, so out the window is trees and birds and grass.

It’s really nice. I have that connection to nature, and I would be unhappy sleeping someplace where there weren’t trees within view, so I have that in both homes. But this is really amazing, to have this much land in back of my house—around a third of an acre.
For a New Yorker, this is a whole realm of different concerns. Rather than going out, I water trees. A few years ago, there was a drought. I came home, and I was like, oh my God, my trees are dying. I didn’t know established trees needed to be watered, and I panicked. 

Exactly. In New York, I’m not a plant person. I can hardly keep any kind of plants alive. I’ve never had that talent for it. I like dogs because it’s very clear that you have to walk them. Plants just die, you know? They have no extroversion, and the squeaky wheel gets the oil.
My mother was a plant person, and anything she touched thrived. She watered them, and she talked to them—she just had a way. But she didn’t talk to us.

She was a very funny woman. She would go to the supermarket and suddenly perform for the cashier, you know? But she didn’t ever ask us a personal question. I don’t remember her ever asking me anything about how I was. Ever. My dad was a very different person, but she was not a nurturer.
But the quote from the poem is true. I struggle with it because when I moved to New York, I  lived in a group apartment on the Upper West Side, and then I moved to SoHo, but I didn’t really find myself until I moved to the East Village. It was the ‘70s, and it was minimalism, and I was adamant that I wanted very little.

Yes! It has a reason—I mean, I’m a poet because they can’t take that away from me. Growing up, I wanted to play musical instruments. I wanted to take special art classes. I was a really creative kid, but they were like, why do you want that? Who do you think…?

The latter really was always the undercurrent. Poetry is so funny because you could just be a sneaky little fuck, writing at your register, writing at any kind of job. Poetry was a kind of secret universe in a deprived life. Like Aladdin—you rub the lamp, and suddenly you go into this incredible space. It’s such a deprived kids’ fantasy of untold wealth and expansiveness. Who in New York hasn’t had that dream? You open the closet in your apartment and discover there’s all these other rooms.

I made that a design scheme when I was young, but not just with the look of my apartment—I treated my work like that, and it was such a mistake in retrospect because I would write a poem, I would write all these drafts, and then I would destroy all the drafts. I wanted there to be only one poem—that was very important to me. It was so stupid because I lost a crate full of manuscripts between 2009 and 2011. They might come back to me, but every year I made a binder of my best finished poems of that year, ‘78, ‘79, all the way up to the ‘90s when we had computers. And it’s gone.

Luckily, I was very ambitious, so I published a lot of the ones that were good. But it was the era of writing on your manual typewriter, and that rat tat tat tat proved that you were a writer, the very sound of it. Often, I wrote the very first draft on the typewriter, but I rarely write the first draft on a computer. 

Yeah, the computer feels like a level of publication. But my apartment was just a desk, a cot, pull-chain lights that I made into ropes. I remember Rene Ricard coming into my apartment, and he was like, ‘Oh my God, this is monkish, butch, maternal’. But I think I wanted to make the small, big. My fantasy about my apartment was that it was a baby loft. Lofts had a lot of space, and the only way you could mime a lot of space was to have very few things. I also noticed that poor people always had a lot of stuff. I didn’t want to look poor, so I wanted to have very little.

Ha! What year was this?

That’s my relationship to Henry David Thoreau. We used to swim in Walden [Pond], and you would see these tourists with these little straw hats on—the Cambridge people. We were like, there’s nothing there. Then I went to college and read Walden, and Thoreau was one of my favourite writers.

But yeah, they’re at odds. It really is the story of the town, and it’s the struggle of the city government and different interest groups and mismanagement and corruption. Old Marfa ultimately wins, and Chinati is not regarded as old Marfa. They say ‘Chinazis’.
There’s obviously things to be said for both camps, but we tried to get a ceasefire from the city council of Marfa. The support was huge; we had a table in front of the post office, and we got 500 signatures. The people on the city council are in office on far less than 500 signatures.

Yes! But we had to go through the city council to get it, so we brought all these signatures. It was a packed meeting. We all made comments. We were very passionate. But they break all the rules, and we were 100 percent stonewalled. We couldn’t even have a public discussion about it. They just let us be in the room. They let us spew. We had more power than they did, but not of the right sort. In my experience with the New York City government, it’s the exact same.

It just comes down to who needs something, who wants something, who’s making deals, who do you think you’ll get things from in the future? 

It’s just ubiquitous in my work and in my life at this time. I believe it’s the centre of the world. I believe the conflict there is right at the heart of everything we’re struggling with, whether it’s ICE or saving a park—every single struggle seems to be right there. 

It can’t not be in the room. How can people just proclaim their new book is coming out and say, ‘Hurray for me!’ when people are watching their infant die? Donald Judd, if he was alive, would be making a stand. He would bring it down.

But I look at myself and think, do I have a lot to lose because I don’t have a teaching job, I don’t have a family to support? I have these animals, but what’s my risk? On the other hand, in a life that is supported by many sources, but no one source—I have the US government for Social Security, and I’m receiving a pension from the University of California—if either of those institutions either went under or decided, for political reasons, I would be cut off… I mean, I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I don’t know what has happened and what has not happened to me because of my political stance.

‘Because of my children’, or ‘I’ve got a family’. There have been weird moments in my career where things just went cold. I can have all sorts of paranoid maps of my life and my career, but that’s just a different way of experiencing risk. 

It’s sort of acquired. The sociality here is really fun because it’s very much in people’s homes. There’s a theatre guy, Rob Weiner, and he’s such a force in town. He has a house with a long table, and people come to Rob’s on Wednesday nights and collectively pick a play and read it. The one we did, Measure for Measure, we read it and then eventually had a performance. Wallace Shawn was in it. I played opposite him.
The other thing you do is go for walks. People walk dogs together, and it’s very—I want to say ‘fraternal’, that kind of feeling like you have a lot of siblings

I’m never hosting, but it’s funny because Mark [So] lives here when I’m not here. He’s a composer in Los Angeles—I think he likes Marfa more than LA, and he knew Marfa before I did. In fact, he even introduced me to the woman I was involved with most recently. But he is much more social in the house than I am. All sorts of people know my house because of Mark.

So do the animals. 

Yeah, I kind of like the secularness of going to New York and not having anyone. But Mark goes out to bars, and they go to bars.

And Mark is a night person. I get up at 7 or 7:30, and I put the water on for green tea. I don’t know why this is important, but at the beginning of a breakup, I just woke up one morning and decided to not do something she wanted me to do, which was the beginning of the end. I walked into the kitchen in New York and thought, I’m not drinking coffee today. I made green tea. And except when I travel, I never drink coffee in the mornings now.
So I’m getting up, getting green tea, and feeding the dogs at 8 maybe. Mark is getting up at 11 and taking the dogs out later in the day and at night. They have completely different lives, and I can feel it. I always think of astronomy. That’s probably something we could talk about for a minute, because we have an observatory here, the McDonald Observatory.

Star Party?

That’s one of my favourite places. And that magazine, StarDate.

I’m addicted to it. I’m subscribed to three or four magazines, and that’s the one I read cover to cover. It’s incredible. 

I have a lifelong fantasy of being an astronaut, so I love landscapes that make me feel like I could be on a different planet, where the beauty is foreign. I felt this in 1990 when I spent the summer living in Santa Fe. By the time you get to White Sands, you’re really on the moon. I love places that have such a foreign cast because it’s so empty of me. I can expand into it.
And with the dogs and astronomy—we know that planets are discovered by noticing how the orbit pulls strangely right here, so there must be something. That’s how I feel when I’m walking these dogs—they’re pulling me, and I’m like, Mark’s been walking them over there. I can tell where they’ve been, but I don’t want to go into [the bar] Planet Marfa in the afternoon.

I think my desire for space has to do with the absolute lack of space I grew up with. I shared a room with my sister right from four to 21. It really staged all kinds of failure for me as a person, my inability to have space. So I value privacy and independence and more. I feel like I really need nobody here. My private joke is it’s my fortress of solitude.

It’s interesting—there would probably be about 15 minutes in my whole life where I thought I should have a child with my body. It wasn’t ever an impulse that I’ve had, and I’ve had partners who wanted to have kids. At some point, I was going to let go or get dragged. Sometimes I think it would have been really great, and I think the reasons I didn’t do it had more to do with the relationships rather than my desire to be a parent or not be a parent. It’s interesting, to start to get really comfortable with the choices I’ve made. You know, last year I had three relationships: two affairs and a courtship. I have people in my life, and I have sex, but part of me still longs for a long-term relationship. But most of me thinks, no, it’s interesting, the life that I’ve had—am having—as a queer person, as a female person, as a non-female person, as a non-parent. That space is really valid and beautiful and—

And my family has everything to do with that. My parents were two very disappointed people who did not have the lives they intended to have, and I think they really pinned it on us. It was really unfair. I’m grateful to them, obviously, that they had us, but I got the message loudest somehow, because my siblings both picked a partner and have stayed with them for life. I wiggled some way. 

Nothing creates space more than love. I mean, the very fabric of life seems different when I experience myself as in love, you know, or actively loving somebody. It makes the world another place, and I like that place a lot. It might be my best place. 

Writing more? Hell yes! Last summer, I was in love. I met somebody in Provincetown, and we had an amazing—the best experience of my life with another person. Now we’re not in touch at all, and that was that. But I wrote so much.

Both in my novel and poems, but poems right up front. Hell, I want to be alive in such a specific way, and it’s so engendered by this feeling. Love is astronomy. Love is being propelled into another space that is deeply familiar. It’s the most surreal thing because it’s here. It’s just an inventory of here that is so charged.

I completely believe that.

How do you feel about dying?

Right? I mean, it’s a huge thing that everybody thinks about all the time, and it changes throughout your life. I’ve lived through friends dying of drugs and alcohol, people right out of college crashing cars, people committing suicide, AIDS. And then slowly, this thing starts to happen, cancer and heart failure. Men have mostly died. Now women are dying: Alice Notley, Fanny Howe, and Rose Lesniak, who was my first love. It’s my joke: I keep feeling like there’s a hole in the room, and I don’t know where it is, and so I don’t know when I’m going to step in it.

My mother lived to 96. My dad died at 44.

She died in 2017. Recently, yeah. My dad, I was 11. I will say, weirdly, I was in the room alone with both my parents when they died.

I blame my mother. I think she did it to me. When she went out to hang clothes, she knew he was going to die, and she couldn’t take it. ‘You be me. And we’re never going to talk about it’.
And now, here it is—my own feelings about mortality. I’m dying now, you know what I mean? Something is going to take me down. I think about it all the time. I live with it. I feel like this would be a great place to die.

I love Marfa. I would be happy to die here. It’s funny—I would never use the word ‘retirement’, and yet I feel my relationship to life has a different quality today. I joke I’m in retirement now, and it almost feels like I don’t have to let that hurt me. I think the thing of me is actually changing. Some part of me is letting go.

How old is she?

I’m so sorry.

How was she doing?

So you’re gonna stay? You’re gonna stick around?

It’s the most important time in your life, next to your own death and your partner’s. When are you going back? 

It’s good you will be there. I was with my mother, and there was something—my sister left a shoebox of photographs and family documents. I was sitting there alone with my mother, who was in a coma, and I thought I could take a picture of one, and as I crossed the room, I looked at my mother, and her eyes went.

Yeah, and then she just died. So in her way, she died alone. I mean, I was with her, but I feel like… I don’t know.

It’s kind of incredible. But I am scared shitless because I miss everything. I feel like I’m one of those people—like, something amazing is happening, and I turn to the side and think, did I just miss that? I feel like I’m so distracted. I mean, I know what I’ve seen, and I know what I’ve been present for, and they’re really great, important things. But you know how much you miss, and I guess I hope I don’t miss my death. I hope it doesn’t happen by accident, you know? I’d like to see it coming.