(Erin Belieu, Cate Marvin, Eileen Myles, Monica Youn) Prominent poet and literary activist Eileen Myles and recent National Book Award finalist Monica Youn will present readings from their respective work to be followed by a conversation on feminist poetics with VIDA co-founders and poets Erin Belieu and Cate Marvin. AWP participants are encouraged to join a brief Q&A period to be held afterwards.

Published Date: September 26, 2012

Transcription

INTRO:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Chicago on March 3rd, 2012. The recording features Cate Marvin, Erin Belieu, Eileen Myles, and Monica Youn.

Erin Belieu:

Hi. Thank you all for coming. My name's Erin Belieu.

Cate Marvin:

I'm Cate Marvin.

Erin Belieu:

Do you want to go ahead?

Cate Marvin:

We would really like to thank AWP for being so generous with us and Christian Teresa in particular for helping us handle a myriad of details, some very annoying details. In fact, they've been really wonderful to us. We also need to thank ... VIDA is a really ... Erin and I are just a small part of VIDA. There's a lot of people who work really hard for VIDA and we want to thank all the folks. We have some fabulous interns, Jen Fitzgerald, Steven Krowska, Holly Bordough, and we have a terrific-

Erin Belieu:

Olivia Johnson.

Cate Marvin:

Olivia Johnson, and we have a whole bunch of awesome people. Thank you Adam Bowles, and-

Erin Belieu:

He was a really good bartender.

Cate Marvin:

He's an excellent bartender and also basically if you're here, you care about what we do and we really appreciate that. We're going to keep this brief because we know that you're not here for us. You're here for Eileen and Monica and we want to thank them for giving us their time.

Erin Belieu:

Do you want to say something about the count?

Cate Marvin:

Oh, please visit our website. We have a new count up. It's a 2011 count. We again review 14 venues. The disparities are still pretty much the same, but if you click, there's a link that you can ... I actually learned how to create a hyperlink, which I'm really proud of, but we have about 80 articles and posts and blogs that have followed charted account. In fact, Eileen's essay on being female, that's one of them. So go ahead and explore and you can follow the conversation for yourselves and we would really like for you to join in. And we also have a blog that's going to debut on the 1st of April, and that's going to be a forum in which we hope that everybody's interested in this whole matter. We'll talk, chime in.

Erin Belieu:

Okay. I'm going to go ahead and introduce Monica Youn. We don't have that much time, so this is less of an introduction than Monica deserves. But Monica Youn is the author of two books, Barter and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her prizes include a Library of Congress Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and she was a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. So even though the count doesn't look that good, there are lots of amazing women writers, Monica being one of them who are kicking ass and taking names. So please welcome Monica Youn.

Monica Youn:

I want to thank Cate and Erin and everyone at VIDA for inviting me here and everyone for being here on a very packed schedule day, as if it is not intimidating enough to be reading with one of my heroes, Eileen Myles. I also have to say that this is one of the biggest rooms I have ever been in my life. I mean like in Manhattan, this would be considered like a borough or something. But anyways, I'm totally thrilled and very intimidated to be reading with Eileen, but I will get started. So this first poem is based on kind of the death of a thousand cuts. I'm going to start with some new work and then move on to the book Ignatz and Kind of the death of a thousand cuts, the way it was administered is they would put the person in what was called a wire jacket, which is basically like a chicken wire straight jacket. It's as morbid as it sounds. Self-portrait in a wire jacket.

To section off is to intensify, to deaden. Some surfaces cannot be salvaged, leave them to lose function to persist only as armature holding in place those radiant squares of sensation, the body, a dichotomy of flesh and blood. Wait. Here in the Trellis garden you are becoming. Soon you'll know that the strictures have themselves become superfluous, but at that point you'll also know that gridded you could no longer survive.

These next few poems are part of a series I'm writing based on this 15th century French poem that I learned about in high school called Ballade des Pendus, Ballad of the Hanged Hanged Men by François Villon and Villon himself was a criminal and was I think sentenced to death at least one point in his life. And this poem I think stuck with me for all of these years because it's from the point of view of men who have been hanged after death and there hanging on the gallows and they've been put there as kind of a lesson to the town for their crimes. So the poem is kind of shocking because it talks about the process of their decomposition, but also contains this odd little refrain, which is this prayer for absolution where they keep saying, "And please God absolve us," or, "Pray to God to absolve us." So these are some poems based on that idea. This first one is called Interrogatoire de Pendus, which is Interrogation of the Hanged Men.

What is your face? A house of sorts. What is your foot? A chipped stone blade. What did you dream? A rain washed road. What did it mean? It meant nothing. What have you learned? The sky forgives. What does it forgive? Each jet its wake. What do you want? A smile of sorts. No. What do you want? I want nothing. What's in your hand? A magpie quill. No. Show me. What's that in your hand?

A palinode is a poem that retracts a statement made in a previous poem, Palinode de Pendus. A bird falls off a balcony panicked, grasping fistfuls of air. I was wrong, please. I was wrong. Please, I wanted nothing. Please, I don't want. Reprise, Reprise de Pendus. One. A blunted hook beneath the breastbone as if someone yanked out a strip of you, a great inrush of cold night and taillights and the avenue. Two, the nerves frenzy feeding on nothing. Three, I knew God to be absolute zero. All movement slowing coming to a stop. So I'm now going to turn to my most recent book Ignatz in sort of an abrupt change of mood. So Ignatz is based on the Krazy Kat comics, which were written between 1914 and 1944.

And Krazy Kat is really very simple. There's a cat named Crazy who is ... Yeah. Thank you, Adam. Thank you. Thank you. There's a cat named Crazy who is in love with a mouse named Ignatz and Ignatz doesn't love crazy. Ignatz likes to hit crazy in the head with a brick and since Crazy is crazy, crazy takes this as kind of a sign of affection. And so there's this wonderful, the important thing to understand is this is a daily comic strip for 30 years and every day there's kind of cat, mouse, brick, cat, mouse ... I mean, it's amazing how long he manages to keep this very simple modular cycle going. That's kind of what inspired this. But you really shouldn't take the cat and mouse thing too literally or else you will become very confused.

Ignatz ... Adam thinks I'm funny. I love Adam. Ignatz invoked a gauze bandage wraps the land and is unwound stained orange with sulfates, a series of slaps molds a mountain, a fear uncoils itself. Testing its long, cool limbs. A passing cloud seizes up like a carburetor. Falls to earth lies broken backed lidless in the scree. A sedaline torches now snug in their holsters shot backs trundled back behind the dawn, a mist becomes a murmur becomes a moan deepening dust choked fissures in the rocks. Oh, hideous Ignatz. Oh, come to us by moonlight. Oh arch, your speckled body over the earth.

Ignatz obad star maps of broken capillaries, crown of infrared song of drifting dune, the smooth, bold trees of his interior blossoming, unblossoming. I spent six days almost touching you. Landscape with Ignatz. The raw hide thighs of the canyon straddling the knobbled blue spine of the sky. The bone spurred heels of the canyon prodding the gaunt blue ribs of the sky. The sunburnt mouth of the canyon biting the swollen blue tongue of the sky. The hangnailed fingers of the canyon snagging the tangled blue hair of the sky. The blistered thumbs of the canyon tracing the blue veined throat of the sky. The sleep crusted lids of the canyon blink open your soft, your cerulean eye. Ignatz Oasis.

When you have left me the sky drains of color like the skin of a tightening fist, the sun commences its gold prowl batting at tinsel streamers on the electric fan crouching I hide in the coolness I stole from the brass rods of your bed. The wedding of Ignatz. Weight is the end of wanting the simples gleaming in their rests in the game called hypothesis. An orange is gripped between the chin and shoulders then is transferred with care and laughing to the chin and shoulder of the next in line. Then a flaming log is rolled into the river, then a chalk circle is drawn around each plate. One day I walked to the window robed in the loveliest robe of the year. One day I knelt down by the fountain, a crown of parsley, a crown of dill. One day my hands closed on the handles a match tip was placed beneath my tongue. Listen to me, someone has tricked you. There was never an apple.

Ignatz Domesticus. Then one day she noticed the forest had begun to bleed into her waking life. There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners. She thought to brush her hand against his thigh, she thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail. The supersaturated blues were beginning to pixelate around the edges to become a kind of grammar soot amassed in drifts in the corners of the room. She pressed her thumb into the hollow of his throat for a while and then let him go.

A couple more. X as a function of distance from Ignatz. She opens the door, he's 12 inches away, her fingers still splayed across the baton down brass latch of his sternum. She closes the door, he's eight feet away. Her palm skids down the banister clings to the fluted globe of the finial. He's 28 feet away. She opens the door. The black air is fast flowing and cold. She closes the door. She clutches her thin intimacy tight under her chin and trips down the steps. He is 40 feet away, the stiff wind palpably stripping his scent from her hair. From the numb fingers she raises to her mouth.

A cab pulls up, she opens the door, she bends the body, hitherto upright, she closes the door, the cracked brown vinyl. He's 90 feet away biting the backs of her thighs. Red blotches fusing her cheeks. "I'm sorry, please stop," she says he's 400 feet away. Please stop the cab. She opens the door, the cab stops, she pushes the 20 through the slot. He is 700 feet away. She closes the door, the husk of something dry and light falls to the sidewalk, crumbles away. She opens the door. He's two feet away. She closes the door.

Very short poem. Invisible Ignatz. I would forget you were it not that unseen flutes keep whistling the curving phrases of your body. Winged Ignatz. There are 27 feathers, there are 15 feathers on the right shoulder blade 12 on the left, curving outwards, then streaming down the back. When I say feathers, I mean to say lines. Undulating lines more like hair than like feathers. Since unlike feathers, these lines do not convey a rouched or corrugated effect as might be rendered by layered tears of scallops or by a fingered edge. Instead of lines I might more precisely have said, cuts discontinuous cuts dotted with blood clots. Flinches cluster at the clots like mayflies as one imagines the blade snagging in the skin or the cuts cross one another.

Mayflies too are winged, but no one wants them unless to convey a sense of the ephemeral, A fan of surface scratches that splay across the shoulders but do not break the skin. Merely exhortatory inviting one to read the underlying cuts as dimensional on the verge of lifting out of the skin, unfurling above the shoulders, lines of blood fleshing themselves then feathering themselves in strength and mass rivaling the body muscle-bound that submitted to give them birth. And I'll end with this. The book has four sections and in comic strips you can keep killing off your characters. So, The Death of Ignatz. Fallow lies Ignatz. His salt hands helpless, wicking moisture from the air. The Death of Ignatz, the mesas sink to their knees and let the snickering dunes crawl over them. The Death of Ignatz scratched in the plexi of the defunct jukebox. God, I was such a simple song. The Death of Ignatz. The architect leapt from the bright bell tower and the Sea slunk back to her cage. Thank you.

Erin Belieu:

It's my pleasure to introduce Eileen Myles who is the author of numerous books including The Importance of Being Iceland. I love that title. Essays in Art and the forthcoming Snowflake. Different Streets. Is that correct? Yeah. It's hard to know what to say about Eileen Myles. She's a force, she's a feeling and she was fearless before it was cool to be fearless. So, please welcome Eileen Myles.

Eileen Myles:

Thanks so much, Erin. This is such an honor and it's such a big scary room. I'm a huge Monica fan and your work is so great and I didn't know, the Ignatz, one of my best friends used to love this guy who didn't love him and they were friends, they hung out and he called his friend Ignatz. I was like, "Oh no, I get it. Thank you." Thanks for the pain, Monica. So this book that's not officially out is sort of out and it's called Snowflake and then it flips over and it's called Different Streets and Wave did it. And I just have to say I totally want to thank them for arranging this incredible snow fall outside and that's a press that knows how to publicize a book. I was just like, "Thank you."

So it's going two ways. It was sort of about two locations. I started the book in California and the first poem is called Transitions and it was at a time when I think a lot of things felt like they were changing, including a lot of friends of mine were changing their gender. So it's for Rocco, sometimes I'm driving and I press the button to see who called and suddenly I'm taking pictures, big dark ones. He says, it's not about where you sit to make a film, but I wasn't taking a picture. I was driving, it's black and there's all these lights. I'm strong. It's night and I've driven very far. I keep hearing the music of the weekend. He says, it's not about whether she and I resume, it's how it goes on with me. In my car so long ago, I love someone who read me a poem on the phone about the car of the day.

Remember when I'm driving and the fact that she left it on the phone and that was new? She said I was overreacting and that was too much and we sent down messages in light an act. She hated trees. I thought she's so young because I like nature now and her trunk wrapped around me one day. He licked my arm, my boy and driving home. I thought if he dies, I will see his paw in the sky. I'm seeing it now and she's always home going, [inaudible 00:20:58]. And she said, I love our little meeting. I said, little? Don't denigrate my need to support my need to say that you can. I'm glad I'm home. It's wide out there. We spoke about scaffolding, him, fitting the frame to the eye. She's grown. I wanted to say we laughed about Tang and later on the toilet thought about Tango and Joan, El Tango, Larkin. What's not technology? What's not seeing an iron to say, I hold the line. I hold the day I watch the snowflake melting.

This one's called writing. I was looking at the chandelier. Do you feel that way? She asked. I was driving through Los Angeles getting some help. I didn't know Pema Chodron was a girl. People sounded nuts. She had a sign, I'm hungry, I'm homeless with a really pretty son. She hadn't asked for anything but I gave her five and that felt great. I thought women are a bunch of idiots, but that's what I am. Are you one? I don't count on what I am she said. And that chandelier is more light than anyone else. Snowflake. Where is it? Deep into my Ignatz moment. There's no female in my position. There's no man. Wow. There's a raccoon on the tail of the plane and there's no one seeing that now but me and there's no one close enough right in here to see the further drawing stripes or buildings, the bricks of the world.

I wonder if what I'll say about Sadie and I wonder if they're still living in that state and if they hate me from moving her furniture out and putting it in storage. I walked past that restaurant where I was so mad I could have broke the glass. I'm the only one in the mood to remember this me living. Who threw a snowball against the glass and scared me in my seat so hot with rage? Why am I dry, freezing? I want to go home. I saw a rose in the heart of the year 2001, everything turning rose doghead a wheel of love, but I was so mad. I locked it up and took the key and lived for that moment. Snowflake. I wasn't there. Not even me when she put in the key and it wouldn't turn.

This one's called Mitten And it's a German mitten, so it's not like a paw. It's like in the middle. It's beautiful. I mean it's beautiful here, but the thing is, it is beautiful. The peach sky is beautiful and the blackout outlines of the branches and the leaves. Look, I even hesitate, but it doesn't matter if it all comes at once or breaks down slow. Catch this honking or the rumbling of the world last night in different streets, which I didn't bother to write. I made the point that the two places are connected and it's great where you are too and boom, boom rumble, all the places are connected. Thus, the endless beauty and I have been beaten and suffered and you have too. Whoop, whoop. Listen to that. Someone getting arrested, someone caught someone's heart just stopped. Someone else holding the bag.

I wrote something else about the day holding me and me holding you. A car passes like a big breath. It's what I've got all these things and I hand them to you like Sex in The City, my ideal, our endless sound, our connection. Listen to all your voices now. This one's called Idiot Hoe. Can VIDA Rock that? I was like, "No." Everyone, I want a big apple and hey, you don't live here anymore. Saw your email. I got your address. Hey, yellow shoes. My shirt is yellow too. Is it mad to say I like May so, so, so much at this exact moment, stupid wet? It's a love poem. June 5th, what is the nuisance or new thing about red angles, bars of light in your new named Green Bank? I love you trumpets. The weather. For Alan, Monica, and Francis. It truly was a triple birthday party.

For the most compelling birthday party I'd been to in a while I bought three cards thinking that I heard a wet and sparkling sound. Three pipes, spurting water standing in the park quite near to the corner I meet you on. I go past, I don't know what tonight will deliver the T-shirt. You'll wear an attachment. I'm proud of not knowing you again like that water. I've lived here for a while. What do you think I should say in these cards? I'm as excited about this moment as I was in the beginning. I keep seeing women in the street who resemble my mother hurt wide Christian face.

Isn't an abomination to put that in a poem to my lover not so much to you as with you in it? In the same world of the car, the train ride into Brooklyn, cars turning, scateboards, splash hard, the plastic of the wrong side hitting the pavement. All you see are cops cars in their vans prowling like a city full of meth or a whole middle of a country like a split. Every woman your age, cute. Every woman my age, wounded and glisten. This one's called Smile. I was kind of obsessed with that. The fact that Charlie Chaplin wrote this song, it's so amazing, right? Academy Awards, I mean, a genius like Charlie Chapman could write a standard too. I want you guys to say, "I know, I know," but you won't. It's like the human microphone. "I know Eileen,"

ALL:

I know Eileen.

Eileen Myles:

Thank you so much. It's just not as much fun without a good light and a sharp knife. I mean leaning into the peach of it, people find the time to get there, sharpened or use yours. That drip in the kitchen is like someone I know. Today's cold is like an affirmation of the purchase of yesterday's new shirt. I knew the cold would come sometime, but today I'm wearing that drip most of all. My half made meal and even the space that surrounds the incredible possibility of hunger on and on, like my favorite man Frankenstein. The drip has tones a relationship with the holding bowl that is only holding water. All these rhymes all the time. I used to think Mark Wahlberg was family. So was Tim.

But close to his death, he told me he was adopted. Every time he smiled he thought Eileen is a fool or that's what love looks like. If I woke and my master was horrified, I would go out into the world with this enormous hurt and I have carried mine for so long. I now know it's nothing special. It's just the fall and the sound of her sirens. It's the agony of being human, not a dog who dies maybe six times and the lives of her masters. Everyone's phony and made up. Everyone's a monster like me. Now I know everyone.

This is part of a sequence of poems, only one of which had decided was good, but they all have two things in them, which is mountains and diet coke and it was an outcome of living in Montana for a semester. To the mountains. When I look out at you, how absurd to think of diet Coke killing me. I'm flying through the air and there you are. White and dangerous. Who's kidding who? It's like. Your house. I've walked past your childhood several times and friends of mine babysat your friends, the enormous calm this morning kernels flowing through my clenched fist into an old-fashioned milk bottle. Exactly. I've constructed this time I thought waves, wooden ones. No, flames. As a good middle I climb on top and then politely move over.

I was sexually abused by an entire house. Every shake of the building was my lover. Me abandoning you for not noticing me. Eating alone for years in my family, not putting my foot down, but not picking it up either. Suddenly strong in the new presumed position wider than no more private than yes. Everyone's with men all of a sudden, men made like my time. In the morning, didn't choke the limits of the bottle can leave me in satiety, not safety. Something more native. Listen to me going all horny. Play, lover, play. My girlfriend's like that poem makes me really uncomfortable. I'm like, "It's not about you." That's one of the professional difficulties of being a poet. No California. The only time I may have had a kid was at 19. And if that kid also had a kid at 19, then at 38 I'd be a grandmother. And if that kid next year also had a kid, I'd be a great-grandmother. It's late so I want to call someone in California, but I'm there. Is that an East Coast joke? And so it's like, "Oh, really?" How are we doing? 10? Cool.

My box. This sounds so dirty. Especially I don't know if that generational, I think not, right? It was actually about a box of Tampax which looked ... I've gone through menopause. So it's like to live with somebody who uses Tampax is very surreal. You're like, "What is that?" In terms of design, one box is colored orange the one you want it always is and sits in the bathroom of anyone's house because that's what she wants. It's choosing the wakes things up. I wondered how long all that I needed and encountered here would come like a wave. Not the shake but the after effects. And this box did say there was a way to see this thing alone.

July called it calculus. What is comes in boxes? What is not comes in waves. The dots between mountains surround us and I say they're more marvelous than the sea way overhead. I like flying over them too, thinking that is home. These crazy bumps. When we drive into them tomorrow it won't be bam. It means up swirling on the edge of a cup. And if you don't watch me like a hawk, I won't be scared. I want to be loved like a sunbeam that is, it comes across the room or the ocean. You know the way I drive. I want to lift your fear like a bonnet and kiss your living face. Here, this is mine. Don't misunderstand me.

I'll say the poet thing. A couple more. So there, says the cat. That's it. You had to wait a little longer. Thank you. Right? I was at the gym, I was on the treadmill and I suddenly saw that. I was like, "That's incredible." I feel Robert clearly. So there, says the cat. Isn't that incredible? Now I'm destroying it. I'm digging a hole. You won't even be able to see me in a moment. I'm going. Okay, final poem. It's called Glowing Stick.

I'm probably now and always was a real and complete idiot. One lies on its back by the bed glowing stick a wand to shave my head to call to pace my hybridity onto what is it thus a meaning of a meeting of a meeting? I say a kiss. The stripes are enormous day and night. And we like the enormity of fucking love, the impossible words that leave us on our platforms in the sun spinning. I want to be on a beach with you too. A beach on Mars. There was a woman I claimed I would be dead with if I couldn't have her alive. And you are greater than either in this synapse, you floated in going what? The tiny stick goes orange and then not. You can't even see us everything else. And it's ours. And I love you in the blind spot of our changing ages. Thanks. Thank you.

Erin Belieu:

Where would you like to sit?

Eileen Myles:

I don't know.

Cate Marvin:

It seems like-

Erin Belieu:

You guys should be in the middle.

Erin Belieu:

Okay, we should be in the middle.

Cate Marvin:

All right.

Erin Belieu:

Yeah.

Eileen Myles:

As long as I get water, we sit. We're going to think going on this.

Cate Marvin:

Okay.

Eileen Myles:

Little squat people. Are we turned on?

Monica Youn:

Are we? I don't know.

Erin Belieu:

Very personal Question.

Eileen Myles:

After you're reading.

Erin Belieu:

Testing. There we go. We're all good.

Eileen Myles:

Yeah?

Erin Belieu:

Hello. Hello.

Eileen Myles:

Hello.

Cate Marvin:

Okay, Erin's going to start off.

Erin Belieu:

We just had a couple of questions for Monica and Eileen and then we were going to ... What? Don't give me instructions on the stage. Such a man. Just kidding. That was a joke. So we were just going to ask a couple of questions and then hopefully we'll also have time for a little bit of Q&A. Given that the VIDAs count just came out a few days ago, which I think you're both aware of and that the numbers were not markedly different than what we did last year. We were wondering how you felt about the idea of the count as a tool and a resource or just the notion of keeping track in this particular way.

Eileen Myles:

Oh, I think it's absolutely important and necessary because it makes it real. It's sort of like we all have these vague feelings and we all have these feelings alone. Is this working? Yeah. No, I just think it's incredibly important because why it's important is because when I get the Sunday New York Times and I'm alone or with one other person and I'm drinking coffee and I'm like, "Oh my God, is this just the way the world is?" And you just have this and do you call somebody, do you eat meals? Somebody, you just sit there with this weird misery that somehow things seem worse than ever. So I think the gift of ... Is it VIDA or VIDA?

Cate Marvin:

It's VIDA.

Eileen Myles:

VIDA. So many people, we've had this conversation because nobody said it out loud, we just know you from the internet. So the VIDA thing just is kind of a beautiful conglomerate. It's just a fact. It's just a fact that we can all kind of celebrate/despair together. Yeah.

Monica Youn:

And I love the count. I mean it's so simple is what's so great about it. And you can kind of see it, but I think it needs to start the questioning process. It needs to not be the answer. It needs to be the question like, "Why is this still happening? What can be done to fix it?" As opposed to this is your score.

Cate Marvin:

Well, on that note, a lot of times when journalists ask us about the count, they'll say, why do you think this is? And they'll expect for us to have the answer like, "Why?" And I'm like, "Well, I'm actually not an editor so I don't really actually don't know. I want to know why." And so how do you think we can start to figure out why? Any ideas?

Monica Youn:

I mean, I think maybe just not putting people on the spot and saying like, "Why are your numbers so bad?" But really just getting together a conversation and saying, "Look, let's talk about this real people." I mean, this is an observable phenomenon. It happens and do you think it's a problem? And if you think it's a problem, then what should be done about it?

Cate Marvin:

Yeah.

Eileen Myles:

There was a famous event in the sixties or seventies town hall with Norman Mailer and Joe Johnston and it was a moment, and I feel like why not get all those editors at a table at town hall or some giant space like this and have them explain why they feel comfortable with these figures, and have them answer more uncomfortable questions because the idea of them answering the question with a question is kind of like the rape victim experience where like, "Why did you dress like that?"

Cate Marvin:

Yeah.

Erin Belieu:

I'm going to go ahead and ask you another question. One of the things we were interested in is ... And maybe I know some of my friends who are also teachers have this experience that sometimes people are a little self-conscious maybe about declaring themselves a feminist saying, yeah, I'm a writer and I'm a feminist, or I'm a feminist writer. Whichever way you want to put it. It seems pretty clear to me that you're willing to get up on stage as writers who happen to be women who are also feminists. Is there a moment that you can remember a period of time where you sort came into that consciousness and decided that this was what was something that was really important for you? What was your coming of age story for getting to where you are? Both of you? I think of as women who are very much known as being leaders in the feminist community.

Monica Youn:

I think for me it was ... And I'm not only a poet, I'm a lawyer, and law is not the least sexist profession in the world, especially if you're a trial lawyer, which I am. But I think I remember this when I was weirdly on the college debate team. I was such a geek and I noticed that the women were persistently scored much lower as speakers than the men were. I mean, just because people ... And so I gave this speech and I said, well, if you were to close your eyes and think of the phrase the greatest debater in the world, then what probably comes into your head is some faceless man in a suit with broad shoulders and a big dick, right?

And you think, "Oh, there's a nice manly occupy the podium sort of person." You don't necessarily think of a woman as your first thing. And I feel like those images, I feel like women are much less likely to say to themselves, I'm going to write the Great American novel because you think that a man like Saul Bellow or something is going to be that faceless person writing the great American novel. And so when I decided to come out as a feminist or whatever it was, when you started to understand how gendered these expectations were and how it really structures people's thinking without them thinking about it.

Eileen Myles:

I mean, as long as I can remember, it seemed like it was uneven. It was uneven in my family. There was support and concern and great interest about my brother's education and where he was going to go and sky was the limit. I mean, he wasn't even such a great student, but he was expected to go to Harvard. It was just kind of like, "Yay Terry." And there was just a sense that I would do something or other. And I remember every young aspiration I had when I shared it was instantly feminized even being good at art as a child. And I remember the nun saying to the boy who was good in class, you could be a commercial artist.

And to me, this was the biggest one. You can teach children art. And I remember at the time, I mean this is a very special ... One of the things that's probably great that all of us realize is that when we were kids, we did know we were kids and people acted like we didn't know we were kids because I remember thinking, "I'm a kid now, why am I already teaching kids in the future? What happened to my whole life?" And I knew it was about being a girl. I was already gone off helping. But you were going to jump in.

Monica Youn:

Oh, I was just going to say, yeah, that reminds me, speaking of the debate team, it reminds me of my mother telling me to quit the debate team because it wasn't ladylike and people didn't like women who argued, which I'm afraid I'm a disappointment to her.

Erin Belieu:

And I started to say younger women, but I don't know that this is true. For a lot of women who are sort of in that moment of thinking about sort of coming out as a feminist or trying to take up more space or trying to feel brave enough to speak to some things that maybe they haven't been willing to speak to before. What have been the triumphs for you? What have been the outcomes, maybe not always a triumph, but what are the outcomes of living sort of out loud as a feminist in your work?

Monica Youn:

That's a hard question.

Erin Belieu:

Is that a weird question?

Monica Youn:

That's a hard question. Yeah.

Eileen Myles:

I would say just one day I started to meet my audience and it was just incredible because I felt you don't know what you're writing for and you're writing for ... I felt like I was writing for my little poetry scene that was kind of in the East Village and it was more guide driven than female. And I was just writing for years. And that wasn't until, I don't know, I guess the nineties where suddenly I realized there were just a lot of people who had read me beyond my Ken and that my work had an effect. And it was because in a way I felt like what I was doing a lot for a long time was being part of this male avant-garde and claiming it for female information and material.

And of course the form changed too just because my form is different from a male form, but I didn't know where that was going. And when I realized I had imported some of that style into a more feminist or even queer culture, it was such a great feeling that I had been delivering a message far beyond me and it felt like the work was bigger than I knew. And that was very exciting, because it's sort of like you can't almost can't do it unless you do what's in ... For me, I get scared if I don't limit what I'm doing to the immediate, I just feel like I have to keep my mind on what I'm doing or I get scattered very easily. So it felt local, but it wound up being more than that.

Erin Belieu:

So that's a really interesting thought is that you feel comfortable saying that your form is inherently different than the sort of male avant-garde you were around that you were-

Eileen Myles:

Oh, yeah.

Erin Belieu:

Was that something?

Eileen Myles:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think my works about that a lot. Guys were always talking about the male outsider and I feel like women are sort of incarcerated in the outside. No matter how outside you are, people are telling you you're in here and you're not alone. There's a group of you and you're standing for all women in this weird way and whoever that guy thinks all women are. And of course women have biases too towards us.

Monica Youn:

Well, it's fun because it's being part of a family. I mean, women are connected to each other in a way that men aren't for better or for worse. I mean, you can sit there and you can be like Sarah Palin, you just let the whole side down. And I don't feel like men feel that about other men, just random men, but I think about the triumph question that was interesting. I think I was really happy with the reception. My last book got, I think partially because the book was so not important subject in its subject matter. I mean, it's fully-

Eileen Myles:

Did you say it was domestic?

Monica Youn:

Well, it's 40 love poems about a cartoon mouse. It's not about world politics. And I felt like when I initially submitted the manuscript, my publisher passed on it and I felt like, "Okay, maybe I'm writing about something that's too girly, too trivial too. I should be writing about the stuff I work on in real life." But instead, I felt like writing love poems to a cartoon mouse and I was very happy to just be able to go out with that.

Erin Belieu:

What about you, Cate? What's your response to the challenges and triumphs?

Cate Marvin:

I'm with Eileen. I think it's sort of seeing, meeting people who have met your work who you have not met. And I think that's the miraculous thing about writing is that you can't really chart where your book is gone, where your work is gone. You have no idea who it's ended up with. And actually meeting people who I might've met way back six or seven years or even a decade who are like, this was a real changing point for me because I felt more comfortable as a poet or I read your stuff and I realized I could write this way. So that's kind of just makes me ridiculously happy.

Erin Belieu:

I don't know how much time we have left because I don't have a watch on, but do you think maybe we should open ... Are there people that have questions out in the audience? Ooh, awkward Q&A pause.

Cate Marvin:

When do we end? I don't even have my watch.

Eileen Myles:

Is it 4:15 does it end?

Erin Belieu:

Somebody here must have a watch on, but when does it end? Does anybody know?

Eileen Myles:

4:15?

Erin Belieu:

Yeah, so we have 20 minutes. That's great. Do you guys have questions for Eileen or Monica or Cate? Go ahead.

Cate Marvin:

Or Erin.

Erin Belieu:

If you don't mind standing up and projecting so everybody can hear.

Speaker 6:

This isn't exactly a question, well sort of is. I've been surprised at AWP, how many panels there have been in that aren't explicitly feminist, where there's been one woman and the rest guys? And I wonder whether VIDA or whoever could encourage people to just refuse to be on a panel unless they're not the only woman and that you mentioned Norman Baylor before Cris Bailey, who was a combat with Norman Baylor in the town hall episode, refused to be used in that way [inaudible 00:48:33].

Erin Belieu:

I had this idea that I can't talk Cate into yet of doing a YouTube video with our friend Skip Horack, and it's going to be a fake AWP panel called ... And Skip Horack as a joke. He didn't mean it on purpose, he's a good friend. He said, let's call it Girl Writers: Here to Stay. And skip and I, We came up with this idea that it would be like five guys, Bob Shacochis offered to be in this performance panel, which I thought was going to be awesome. And Skip and I don't know some other people-

Cate Marvin:

Jimmy Kimbrell.

Erin Belieu:

Jimmy Kimbrell. And they were going to ... Over the course of this, there'd be one woman on the panel and eventually she'd just be like there ... She'd have duct tape over her mouth, pull the microphone away as she was talking. Do you think that'd be a good video? I just thought it was really funny. Although I will say that AWP itself has been incredibly responsive to what they've been hearing over the last couple of years and been very much trying to participate and creating a meaningful space for a lot of, not just VIDA, but a lot of different organizations that have various feminist concerns.

So I'm really pleased about that part. So I think there has been progress in that way. I was thinking about, I think on the VIDA website it said something about how Grant, because it did an issue that was feminism, its figures looked better. And I think that's an example of where maybe women should have refused to have been in that issue. Let men write the issue on feminism because one of the things I think that's true is that feminism is obviously not our issue. It's everybody's issue. It's a different way of saying gender.

Cate Marvin:

Yes. And that issue, I don't know if you've had a chance to take a look at it, but that issue is really kind of problematic in a lot of ways. Because it's so funny, everybody's like, "Yay, Granta, you did it." And then it's just like, but there was that one weird issue. Did anyone see this? It is a strange, a man designed to cover and it looks like a Woman's Magazine, but it's just sort of made up a photo of a prototypical hair and then it's a blank face and then it has a bunch of numbers and on the back there's a selection of eyes or mouths that you can apply, but they're all totally generic. They're flawless in a way. And we were just so very perplexed by the cover itself. We thought it was just like, "What? What do you make of this?" So yeah, you should take a look at it

Erin Belieu:

Is there other questions? Go ahead.

Speaker 7:

The watching [inaudible 00:51:20] doing so many people has been amazing, and I'm just wondering, have there been without any surprises, discoveries, what have you been most struck by over the course of working for you?

Erin Belieu:

Thank you for the compliment first.

Cate Marvin:

Frankly, I've been really astonished at how well people can work together and how productive we've been and how I have a really hard time letting other people help me. I tend to be a control freak and I've really had to let go of that and I've come to count on a lot of people and it's been an amazing experience just watching ideas grow and not being the smartest person, letting someone else take the ball and run with it.

Erin Belieu:

My experience is also too having to ... For some reason I sort of enjoy being uncomfortable. Those of you who know me know that's true, but it has been uncomfortable to sort of face some of my own biases, things that I wasn't even aware that I was thinking or thinking that all ... Well, I also have this problem. I think everybody thinks the same thing I do, but turns out unfortunately that's not true. But it's been a real growth experience in terms of thinking about all the different ways that women are not one thing. Chicks don't think this. We've encountered so many different ways of thinking about these issues and sometimes we've got our hands slapped a couple of times for making certain kinds of assumptions. And so, it's really opened my mind to a lot of different possibilities about thinking about what feminism means for lots and lots of different people. And I think that's been a really positive thing, although not always comfortable.

Monica Youn:

Yeah, it's interesting because if you're me and you grow up and you go to school with guys and you go to grad school with guys and you go to law school, if you're me, you go to law school with guys and you think, okay, this is going to be fine. My guy friends are, they're not sexists, they're nice liberated men. We're working side by side. Everything's going to be fine. There isn't a problem. And then it's interesting because after about 10 years out, you start to say, "Hey, wait a second, there is a problem." And why is this happening in the law world? Why are 95% of partners male? In the literary world, why are so many of the power positions the people who get to be the gatekeepers? Why are so many of the men? And what is it that we can do? But I think that the great advantage that we have is that we did ... My generation, you did grow up with guys working at the next desk to you who understand that this distributional consequence means that there's something going on.

Cate Marvin:

Yeah, in my family, I always consider myself the person who really wanted to talk about the uncomfortable things, but I think that I actually tamped down a lot of stuff and I refused to notice that there really was something very wrong and I was comfortable with that for a long time. And then when I had a kid, it just suddenly I became really relegated to the world of women when I had a child. And there were some women who wanted to relegate me to that other academics who wouldn't acknowledge I had a baby and frankly, seemed to have disrespected me for choosing to have a child.

And I was just like, "Well, what does this have to do with you also?" And also, people were ... Then I thought that was going to be writing all these mother poems and that was really no one's business either. Then I started to keep company with women much more than I ever had. And the big surprise for me has been how much happier I've been and how much more stimulating all the conversations are, and actually how much more fun I've had because all the women on VIDA are so funny. And I mean, it really improved my life.

Erin Belieu:

I love you too.

Eileen Myles:

I just want to comment on what you said. Do we have time? We do, yeah. The thing you said about having a kid and then people having that assumption that you're just going to go off and be mommy. And I think that's part of the way that people really think of women is empty. It's sort of like as a diet, as soon as I came out, "She's all lesbian, Eileen." Or-

Erin Belieu:

100%.

Eileen Myles:

Any aspect of my existence that I've acknowledged becomes the whole content. I did some interview recently with C. A. Conrad and I talked about this magazine when I was approaching 50, there was a magazine that used to come in the mail. The government would see you approaching 50 and they would start sending you Modern Maturity. And I was like, "No fucking way. Are they sending me Modern Maturity?" And when I got a little older, I don't know what, I just suddenly didn't think it was such a bad thing. And by then it was called AARP, but I wasn't even talking about age.

I was talking about George Bush and how he wound up on the cover of it and it was what a wonderful retirement this man who killed so many people is having and how he's really relaxing into his ... But it was a very little part of this, and I can't tell you how many people posted this fucking interview as Eileen Myles on Modern Maturity, Eileen Myles on AARP. And I just felt like it's sort of being a female, there's a way that people really are so much more comfortable putting a tag on you so that they can kind of dismiss you as that kind of content.

Cate Marvin:

This is very true, and one thing I really hate about daycare is they always just call you mommy. They won't call me by my first name. They're like, "Mommy, you need to bring more wipes." I'm like, "I'm not Mommy."

Eileen Myles:

Is a dog owner I'm called mommy?

Cate Marvin:

Yeah.

Eileen Myles:

I'm like, "You're Hank's mommy?"

Cate Marvin:

I'm not your mommy.

Eileen Myles:

Fuck, I'm Hanks dad.

Cate Marvin:

Actually, my name got switched up on a mailing list to Marvin Cate and I started to get all this mail, like the New York review of book suddenly is giving me a very deep discounted subscription. I was like, "Well, I think Marvin Cate's going to subscribe and we'll just see what comes our way." And it's really then the New Yorker, then the London review of books and all the people who are sort of the worst offenders on our pies start soliciting Marvin Cate. And that's been a period-

Erin Belieu:

Right. Wasn't it the TLS that said that men like important books? Women don't read important books. That was an amazing-

Cate Marvin:

Marvin is a much more serious, actually, Marvin doesn't really like these publications.

Erin Belieu:

Marvin is a lot smarter than you, Cate. I know that. Are there other questions before we have to keep going? Any last thoughts? Go ahead.

Speaker 8:

What's that quote that you originally [inaudible 00:58:24]?

Erin Belieu:

Oh, I believe it was Peter Stothard in the Times Literary Supplement who when he saw the response to the initial count, I'm not gossiping because he's on record for this.

Cate Marvin:

You can actually see it on our website.

Erin Belieu:

Yeah, you can see it on the website.

Cate Marvin:

It's actually on his [inaudible 00:58:41] pies and there's a few quotes from him on the Times Literary Supplement pies, and basically he said that they weren't surprised by this. Then they acknowledged that women they were a huge readership. They said, we review the best. And women don't tend to read those books.

Erin Belieu:

Women don't like to read important books. He was okay with that. Apparently. He's walked it back a little bit this year. He says he's going to start paying attention to this more. So that's good. What time is it?

Cate Marvin:

They can say that though, and then just forget they said it.

Eileen Myles:

We still have seven minutes.

Erin Belieu:

Anything else?

Cate Marvin:

Let's make the most of it.

Erin Belieu:

Go ahead.

Speaker 9:

Oh, I guess ... I [inaudible 00:59:25] this question. [inaudible 00:59:25] person and like, "You know, I really want Vivian to have higher numbers of this [inaudible 00:59:37]." There's so much more than I want a dumb feminist broke and angry and [inaudible 00:59:41] all that. So I guess I would just like to ask, talk a little bit about your feminist fantasy.

Erin Belieu:

Well.

Cate Marvin:

I mean this is a feminist fantasy what's happening right now, and I think Erin, we have a billion ideas of what we could do. We'd like to have an imprint, we'd like to have a conference. We are rolling out our blog, Her Kind, which I told you about, where we're hoping that there'll be a lot of traffic there. My fantasy is that all these women who write in different genres and are from, "Different aesthetic camps," and who feel like maybe that something else is going on over in that aesthetic camp or everything's okay in playwriting. Oh no, it isn't.

Erin Belieu:

Right. Right.

Cate Marvin:

Everything's okay in fiction. "Oh, no, it isn't." I always felt like that avant-garde poets, that everything was like they were having a good time of it. No.

Erin Belieu:

No.

Cate Marvin:

And so, once you realize that this is something that affects all of us in different ways, but actually not so different ways, once we can have that conversation and across class, across ethnicity, across sexual orientation, across whether you're an academic or you're not, all these things, that's really my fantasy because I think it's going to be an amazing conversation. I think that's going to change things, and I think that once we start these venues we're looking at, I was like, "I'm not their audience." That was the big realization was like, "Why was I thinking that I should be reading this and I'd be interested in this?" So I think creating things that we're interested in is part of it as well.

Eileen Myles:

I often think about a publication. I mean, one of the reasons I've had this conversation a lot lately, one of the reasons people aspire so desperately to have poems in the New Yorker is because it's a mixed magazine. It's not just a poetry magazine. As a poet, after publishing for years, I'm like, "I don't want to be in a poetry magazine." I want to be in a magazine where people read about politics and look at photographs and hear about culture and look at a lot of things, and there's some poems in there, but I want that magazine to not necessarily be called Female. I'd like there to be magazines that are dominated by women that aren't called Women's Magazines so that there are a few men in there. You just happen to notice that this magazine is mostly filled with female content or is just so open to female content that you just simply in another world, in this kind of paradigm shift so that we don't have to call it [inaudible 01:02:10] this time, that there just be a multiple magazines that are implicitly feminist.

Erin Belieu:

My fantasy is that I'm the director of a very large creative writing program in Florida, and one of the things that gives me hope ... Is that a shout-out, a giggle something? One of the things that gives me a lot of hope is honestly the young women who come through my program and hoping that their experience as a lot of women in their twenties and maybe very early thirties, it gives me hope and I want to encourage it even more, that they are not as willing to put up with the sort of shenanigans that I put up with and that they wouldn't have fear that I had to speak when I was younger because I was afraid that I barely got my claws into the sort of poetry conversation. I so desperately wanted to be part of the world and the art, and I was afraid if I were to say anything that it's that special woman status that Audrey and Rich talks about.

And when the dead awakened that I just felt like I was so afraid that they weren't going to let me participate, that I didn't speak, or at least I think I didn't. Apparently I wasn't as good at keeping it to myself as I thought I was, but I really feel good about my women students who don't seem as fearful. I mean, I think that's a real sign of progress that we don't have to have this sort of special woman, one woman per panel, one woman per ... Like, we'll throw one in at the end of the Norton anthology or whatever. I that I think it really has gotten a lot better and the women that I'm teaching make me feel really positive about the future.

Cate Marvin:

Yeah. And I'd like to add to that. I also feel I'm happy with my male students too, and now I have ability to acknowledge these things. I mean, we have our first male intern come on board and has worked his ass off for us before AWP, and I think it's really significant that it's important that men are part of the conversation.

Erin Belieu:

Absolutely.

Cate Marvin:

It's not just like women against men, because it is really not. There's plenty of women who are ...

Eileen Myles:

Something?

Cate Marvin:

Yeah. Yeah.

Eileen Myles:

There you go. Anything else? Next time we did something like this, it'll be fun to work really hard to try and get the audience to be 50% male.

Cate Marvin:

Yeah.

Eileen Myles:

Because this is not our conversation alone.

Cate Marvin:

And maybe our responsibility as women and men is to make sure that when we go to something like this, we have at least one or two guys with us.

Eileen Myles:

Not for protection.

Cate Marvin:

Right.

Erin Belieu:

Oh, well, thank you all for coming. I think Eileen and Monica are quite happy to sign books in the back and come up and say hello, and thank you all for being here. We really appreciate it.

Cate Marvin:

Thanks.

OUTRO:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP podcast series. For other podcasts, please visit our website at www.awpwriter.org.