Eileen Myles on Being Present

In this short video from the program Why We Write, Eileen Myles discusses the experience of sudden loss, her discovery of poetry, and the challenge and pleasure of being present in the moment.

For twenty years, poets Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls; I Must be Living Twice) and Maggie Nelson (National Book Critics Circle Award, The Argonauts) have been friends, mutual influences, and interlocutors on the experiences of living in a poetry and gender inflected writing world. Myles’ latest work—a collection of old and new poems—refracts a radical world and a compelling life. Nelson’s genre-bending memoir, The Argonauts, calls for radical individual freedom and the value of care-taking. Together on stage to read both poetry and prose, these two ground-breaking writers then will join in conversation to, as Myles says, “let thoughts rip.”