Jawnts: A poetic voice, spare, urgent

Eileen Myles arrived in New York in 1974. The city may have been in a crisis both fiscal and, arguably, spiritual, but she fit right in to Manhattan's punk-rock milieu. Myles lived in the same apartment building as Deborah Harry, and her first poetry reading was at the famous club CBGB.

The grimy, broke, graffiti-covered New York of the 1970s was famously hospitable to the writers and artists who thrived on cheap rent and proximity to the heart of the publishing and media worlds. Even if they couldn't get a hearing from the traditional powers in those spheres, they set up their institutions, however small, and got the good word out.

The view from Myles' rent-controlled East Village apartment looks very different today, where few, if any, flaming trash cans litter the streetscape. And now a sweeping summation of her work is being published by the Ecco imprint of HarperCollins. (It is also republishing her 1994 prose fiction book, Chelsea Girls.)

I Must Be Living Twice traces her development from the thickly discursive work of her early days, often snapshots of life in urban bohemia drafted by a poet with a burning cigarette and glass of bourbon in hand. Poems like "Romantic Pain" are sprawling narrative chronicles of New York at night, nicotine-fueled odysseys through a city now buried by years and real estate capital. (Included is her infamous obituary for fellow Bostonian poet Robert Lowell, "the old white-haired coot.") As the poet ages - and gets sober - the poems become slender, reedy columns that march down the page in truncated lines often no longer than three words.

"Some people get fatter as they get old and some people get skinny," Myles says, "and I feel like at least my poems, and sometimes me, are getting really skinny and essential. I sort of know what matters now. It's not necessarily so manic. There's a different kind of urgency and sparseness that's really appealing to me now. I want to need less, but I want to mean more."

It is refreshing to hear a poet dwell on the price of a bohemian life, ruminate on whether all the pain and hunger is worth it, and wonder if there is a livable alternative. ("When rent time comes/you fall down on the street/and cry," she notes matter-of-factly in the poem "Greece.") The idea of the starving artist is almost always more appealing and sexy than the lived experience. Myles is one of the few who actually gives the matter more than a glancing consideration.

Myles' Boston brogue is no longer as strong as it once was, but her reputation as a poet who demands to be seen reading live still survives. Philadelphians can do so at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Penn Book Center, 130 S. 34th St. Admittance is free.

Have an event for Jawnts? jake.blumgart5@gmail.com @jblumgart