Everything you hated about poetry would be there in those recordings. “Gertrude Stein would sound like Margaret Rutherford in Groucho Marx movies. “Every time I heard a poet whose work I liked, I would be deeply disappointed and appalled by their voice,” Myles said, referring to their limited exposure to spoken-word records. “I have to pee.” In a word, it’s sloppy-with purpose. “I’m gonna catch up,” Myles says, just before the player stops. The last track on the album is nothing more than trees creaking in the wind, recorded on Myles’s phone during an outing with friends in Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains. The recording captures everything: the mulligans, the false starts, the mispronunciations, the pages dropping to the floor, the sips of water. “I think I’m just gonna read that one again.” Reading their poem “Sorry” on the first track, they trip on the line “let me hold your shoulders back so you look arrogant and beautiful”-restart, trip again, sigh, and mumble, “Fuck, this is so hard.” They finish, but not well. “It was like having your picture taken when you weren’t posing,” Myles says. In fact, they had already recorded the poems in a studio at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics before Fonograf approached them they didn’t know they were cutting an album at all.
#Wax poetic video professional#
In true iconoclastic fashion, they refused to edit the album, to submit it to the glossy production process that marks most professional recordings. We were discussing Aloha/irish trees, a collection of their poems, new and old, released last May by the vinyl-only poetry press Fonograf Editions-a nod, Myles said, to a musical tradition of bootleg recordings. I think we forget how radical it is to have human speech taken away from the human body.”
“The notion of sound taken away from the signifier, which was a new thing when we first started making sound recordings. “The name for it is really great: acousmatic sound,” Myles told me. An ethereal dissonance lingers between the intimacy of the material and the distance of its creator. And yet to hear Myles reading their poems on vinyl-the static and silence between poems, between lines, their voice quickly swallowed by the studio walls-is a ghostly, lonely experience, like reading a trunk of old letters from the recently deceased. To read Eileen Myles in print is, of course, to read a poet who’s very much alive, whose aliveness seems to jump off the page.
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