Pathetic Literature Read online

  PATHETIC LITERATURE

  Also by Eileen Myles

  For Now

  Evolution

  Afterglow (a dog memoir)

  I Must Be Living Twice / New and Selected Poems, 1975–2014

  Snowflake / different streets

  Inferno (a poet’s novel)

  The Importance of Being Iceland / travel essays in art

  Sorry, Tree

  Tow (with drawings by artist Larry R. Collins)

  Skies

  on my way

  Cool for You

  School of Fish

  Maxfield Parrish / Early & New Poems

  The New Fuck You / Adventures in Lesbian Reading (with Liz Kotz)

  Chelsea Girls

  Not Me

  1969

  Bread and Water

  Sappho’s Boat

  A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains

  Polar Ode (with Anne Waldman)

  The Irony of the Leash

  PATHETIC LITERATURE

  AN ANTHOLOGY

  EDITED BY

  EILEEN MYLES

  Grove Press

  New York

  Introduction and “After Words” Copyright © 2022 by Eileen Myles

  All other copyright information listed in the credits on page 639

  Jacket artwork: Nicole Eisenman, Tail End, 2021. © Nicole Eisenman.

  Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Thomas Barratt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: November 2022

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-5715-7

  eISBN 978-0-8021-5717-1

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  for East River Park

  and everyone who played

  there, who lived and landed and

  leapt through the branches

  of its trees, its trees

  and the activists

  who sat there too

  on the coldest

  morning ever

  Contents

  Introduction by Eileen Myles

  “untitled” by Alice Notley

  “we’re the only colored people here” by Gwendolyn Brooks

  “People Without Names” by The Friend

  “Loveland” by Kevin Killian

  “Yesterday I Was” by Ama Birch

  “Afterword: The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle”by Andrea Dworkin

  “Truth or Consequences” by Ariana Reines

  Excerpt from The Pain Journal by Bob Flanagan

  “A Description of the Camp” by Baha’ Ebdeir

  “Would You Wear My Eyes?” by Bob Kaufman

  “August 6, 2011” by Brandon Shimoda

  Excerpt from The Romanian: Story of an Obsession by Bruce Benderson

  “My Faggot Kansas Blood Confessions to the Earth” and “My Faggot Blood on His Fist” by CAConrad

  “Reading My Catastrophe” by Camille Roy

  “Soap Bubbles in the Dirty Water” by Can Xue

  Excerpt from Texas: The Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa

  Excerpt from My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman

  “Before You Go” by Charles Bernstein

  Excerpt from If He Hollers, Let Him Go by Chester Himes

  Excerpt from I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

  Excerpt from “Some Other Deaths of Bas Jan Ader” by Dana Ward

  “Being Close to Data” by Dara Barrois/Dixon

  Excerpt from God Jr. by Dennis Cooper

  Excerpt from “Fat Chance” by Dodie Bellamy

  Excerpts from Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

  “Campaign Letter for President of the United States, 1991” by Eileen Myles

  “that flaming brand” and “Boulder/Meteor” by essa may ranapiri

  Excerpts from Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan

  “A Child in Old Age” and “A Vision” by Fanny Howe

  “there is religious tattooing” by Fred Moten

  “Play It Again, S” by Gail Scott

  Excerpt from Letter to His Father by Franz Kafka

  Excerpt from Lenz by Georg Büchner

  Excerpt from My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley

  “My Struggle” by Jack Halberstam

  “This Dark Apartment” by James Schuyler

  “Chronicle” by Frank B. Wilderson III

  Excerpt from Winter in the Blood by James Welch

  “28.” by Jerome Sala

  “An Obituary” by Joe Proulx

  “Stop” by Joan Larkin

  “The Merry Widow and The Rubber Husband (or How I Caught HIV: Version 4; Fall 1983)” by Joe Westmoreland

  “The Copyists” by Jocelyn Saidenberg

  “Catullus Tells Me Not to Write the Rant Against the Poem ‘Good Bones’ by Maggie Smith” by The Cyborg Jillian Weise

  Selections from The Hotel Wentley Poems by John Wieners

  “The Cult of the Phoenix” by Jorge Luis Borges

  “A Woman Is Talking to Death” by Judy Grahn

  “You Better Come” by Justin Torres

  “New Haven” by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

  “SMALL / MEDIUM / LUST” by Andrea Abi-Karam

  Excerpt from Great Expectations by Kathy Acker

  “38” by Layli Long Soldier

  Excerpt from Light While There Is Light by Keith Waldrop

  “Shadow Janitor” by Kim Hyesoon

  Excerpt from Children in Reindeer Woods by Kristín Ómarsdóttir

  “In Case I Don’t Notice,” “God Gives You What You Can Handle,” and “The Only Good” by Laura Henriksen

  Excerpt from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

  Excerpt from Wigger by Lawrence Braithwaite

  “Worms Make Heaven” by Laurie Weeks

  “the mother’s story” and “slave cabin, sotterly plantation, maryland, 1989” by Lucille Clifton

  Excerpt from No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman

  Excerpt from All the Battles by Maan Abu Taleb

  Selections from Bluets by Maggie Nelson

  “East River Park Oak Tree” by Marcella Durand

  Excerpt from “Potatoes or Rice?” by Matthew Stadler

  “For the Death of 100 Whales,” “Flower Garland Froth,” and “Fleshy Nave” by Michael McClure

  “Polishness” by Michelle Tea
br />   “haiku,” “untitled 8,” “5 years old,” and “untitled 2”by Mira Gonzalez

  “Sum,” “People Like Monsters,” “How to,” and “Great” by Morgan Võ

  “Wedding Loop” by Moyra Davey

  “My Brother, My Wound” by Natalie Diaz

  Excerpts from Goner by Nate Lippens

  “it doesn’t matter how you fall into light, she said” and “think of the words as angels singing in your vagina, she said” by Akilah Oliver

  “Los Angeles” by Porochista Khakpour

  “NIIZH” by Nicole Wallace

  “Letter Three” by Qiu Miaojin

  “Intercepts” by Rae Armantrout

  “The Gift of Sight” by Rebecca Brown

  Selection from The Activist by Renee Gladman

  “April 4 Friday” by Rose “Rosebud” Feliu-Pettet

  “Kleist in Thun” by Robert Walser

  “Ed and the Movies” by Robert Glück

  “Four times over,” “I see you and I am getting closer,” and “Strain” by Sallie Fullerton

  “Yesterday I went to him full of dismay” by Rumi

  “Manual for General Housework” by Saidiya Hartman

  Excerpt from Molloy by Samuel Beckett

  Excerpt from Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

  Selections from The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon

  Excerpt from Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec

  “Letter I: Hesitations Concerning Baptism” by Simone Weil

  “Stingray” by Simone White

  “It’s dissociation season” by Precious Okoyomon

  “TOTAL LOL” by Sophie Robinson

  “The Slow Read Movement” and “Lincoln’s Lost Speech” by Sparrow

  “Inez, I Have to Gloat: You’re Gorgeous” and “Inez, When Someone Tells You You’re a Bitch” by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

  “Where I Left Off” by Susie Timmons

  “Falling for You” by Tim Johnson and Mark So

  Selections from Up Your Ass by Valerie Solanas

  “Goodbye Forever” by Steve Carey

  Excerpt from La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc

  Selection from The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Tom Cole

  “Time” by Victoria Chang

  “A Story that the United States is Made of” and “Pass” by Tongo Eisen-Martin

  Excerpts from The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo

  “MW Duet,” “Awake,” “Body,” and “Orlando” by Will Farris

  After Words by Eileen Myles

  Contributors

  Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  In general poems are pathetic and diaries are pathetic. Really Literature is pathetic. Ask anyone who doesn’t care about literature. They would agree. If they bothered at all.

  Perhaps the only accomplishment here is I’m saying that as an insider. This book is a kind of hollow. All these pieces of the rock (meaning Literature) long and short are just what I like. The invention of pathetic literature surely is Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book. More than a thousand years ago she kept her diaries, her interminable and adorable lists, her sovereignty to herself. Being discovered, she admits, kind of ruined things.

  In light of our different pace I’d say we’re ready for ruin.

  I need to start this book at the beginning which is to say how I landed on pathetic as a badge of distinction. In the late twentieth century there was a movement in visual arts known briefly as Pathetic Masculinity that has since vanished as a genre and simply became part of what we know. What exemplified pathetic art then was an orientation to crafts, to feeling, to the handmade and diaristic. It was kind of dykey. Using cuddly and abject stuff like stuffed animals rather than producing work that was determinedly abstract. There was a readymade aspect to a lot of it. And it wasn’t just any stuffed rabbit, it was the one you carried with you for all twenty-eight years of your childhood and now even to look at it produces trauma so the objects had secondary meaning too. Which is how it got to be art. And I have to say that pathetic art really pissed me off. Right out of the gate it resembled feminism. I mean give credit where credit is due! Feminist artists had long been appropriating crafts—not to be “natural” as the late Mike Kelley once said in an interview (as opposed to his own “‘ironic’” use of similar materials) but to deliberately hijack the production of doilies and hand-sewn cushions and knowhow away from the den of the patriarchal family in order to pump up the pleasure in collective women’s spaces and community activism.

  Other feminists, Eleanor Antin and Mary Kelly, seized on the ubiquitous graphs and diagrams of sixties and seventies conceptual art to chart the veracities of domesticity like being descended upon by in-laws when you had a new kid. I heard one tale of a giant abstract painting on women’s land that basically was a giant menstrual chart of everyone living there. Feminists were pretty funny and also were using the materials of art to make a statement, to undo something, there was a utopian purpose as opposed to Mike’s being sad or Paul McCarthy bad. Their art was boyishly satanic cause they had suffered too. Nobody in the art world of the 90s “enjoyed” patriarchy (punk was against it) but good men and bad men and especially sad men made a terrific living in there whereas women more likely reaped the pathetic jouissance of community and later academic jobs. The story about seventies feminism is that it was dominated by white women which is not really true but what feminist artists and activists did share was a desire to undo white male dominance and the system itself. The work had a message or was definitely floating in one.

  Which gets me to literature in that there are parts of the literary world where one can readily make political meaning with the messily colloquial, the hand-writ, the felt. I mean who gave Judy Grahn the authority to enclose an entire world, all its institutions, in a single poem, “A Woman Is Talking to Death.” Having been tossed from the military for being a lesbian in the early sixties she then turns out to be uniquely prepared to know everything. In 18 pages, so I’ve included the whole thing here. I’m eager for everyone to know this poem, a moment in time and a political folk art masterpiece. The tone shifts at will from vulnerability to pompousness. Lawrence Braithwaite in a chapter from Wigger slides a peephole open onto a druggy vortex where by means of a bit of graffiti scrawled on an office door an abused kid sends a valentine and rats on his teacher at once. It’s pithy horror syncopated by a poet (in prose). The variegated pieces of the rock in this collection make a whirling system of difference, young, established, yes Beckett’s in here, that old weirdo. But Gertrude Stein isn’t. I actually don’t think of her as pathetic. Burroughs is not pathetic. Ginsberg is. I had to stop myself while this volume is only immense.

  I am definitely interested in the surprising edges or the forced march of a riveting pattern. And there’s something indeterminately true about each and every one. Sometimes it’s in the writer’s very willingness to make that gesture at all. To make this of that.

  Like Robert Musil said of Robert Walser, he was “sui generis, inimitable,” his work being “not a suitable foundation for a literary genre.” Is that praise? Like you couldn’t start anything here. But what if that lack was the organizing force?

  Samuel Delany tells us that in the gay porno theaters of Times Square (circa 1970–1989) men were not only getting blow jobs but were very often making friends. He essays for the dirty fealty of contact over networks. He met his own life partner in such a way. Each of these writers has a discomfort or a restlessness that exceeds their category somehow. Work that acknowledges a boundary then passes it. “It” being the hovering monolith, that bigger thing that confirms. There’s no institution, or subculture, where any of this all belongs. This gathering is not so much queer as adamantly, eloquently strange, and touching, as if language itself had to pause. Less an avant-garde
than something really beside the point. Until it begins to steamroll. In literature there are so many little empires. If you begin in the state of poetry and I guess a great percentage of the writing here is that or is poetry-influenced so what we’re really talking about is a teeming hive of mini-fiefdoms. They don’t make an arc—unless it’s toward devastation like Victor Hugo.

  I’ve collected whoever’s in here for their dedication to a moment that bends, not in a “gay” way but you know how when you’re walking towards the horizon it seemingly dips.* And you feel something. That’s pathetic. It’s an empathetic thing. The light shifts and biologically we turn too. People get different. Take the word crepuscular. The blue moment. Some creatures only come out right then. A lot of the world is trained to think of that part of existence as vacation or what happens during drinks but I’m saying that no I think it feels like a life. As a citizen of the United States I’m always surprised by where I live and how I live. Looking back on 2003 when George Bush was bombing the hell out of Iraq (and Joe Proulx shows us in “An Obituary” what that looked like “on the ground”) it’s clear the destruction of the world trade center handed George an opportunity.

  Same way Hurricane Sandy is creating one right now here in New York (after doing nothing for nine years), turning East River Park, the most human playground where little league kids play and families barbecue on the poor side of the river into a vivid real estate opportunity. Rather than “freedom and democracy” they are calling it “flood control.” Because natural disasters yield development.

  When I talk about the bigger world, bigger literature, bigger things that’s what I mean. Something with enormous resources and a singleness of purpose. Something that puts women’s names on storms. Is it just white supremacy and patriarchy and capitalism rolled into one. Does it have another name? Gwendolyn Brooks reporting the mundanity of being the only Black people in a movie theater and her 1950s narrator Maude Martha, lovingly noting the apricot stain on her partner’s shirt bring on the embodiment of being Black in this country more than a Hollywood account of Fred Hampton being shot in his bed.

  Trayvon Martin got shot in a gated community because there were no Black people “in there” though there were. Racism is a language in the minds of white people that gets read onto the bodies of Black people (undoubtedly occupying their minds too) so that just being with his skittles in the wrong place is reason enough for a kid to be killed. The skittles are pathetic. Everyone knows about them. When Frank Wilderson describes (in Afropessimism) going as a teenager to Fred Hampton’s bullet-ridden apartment (which the Chicago Police Department kept open like a cautionary amusement park for ninety days) on a date, his story authenticates the horror. It inhabits it.