Vincent Katz’s Poetry Selections: Excerpts from Inferno by Eileen Myles
Dia’s Readings in Contemporary Poetry series is curated by poet and author Vincent Katz. These readings emphasize the experimental aspects of contemporary poetic practice and foster exchange between diverse voices. Here, Katz selects a poem or text that was featured in a reading that particularly resonated with him.
Eileen Myles
Originally recorded on November 18, 2010
Scroll to 0:28 to hear Myles read from Inferno
Eileen Myles, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1949, reads a section from their novel Inferno, in which the narrator talks about the dangers, bravery, and risk involved in doing poetry readings, especially if, as in this case, it is a reading in which the poet’s identity is coming into focus. They speak of exposing their throat to the audience in the awkward pauses between poems. They liken the manual typewriter, on which they wrote their early poems, to a very physical action, like skiing, in which one’s whole body is at play. One must master, or at least be aware of, the specific effects of the complex mechanism they are using to compose. A fascinating text read in Myles’s inimitably engaging style.
Vincent Katz has lived in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan for much of his life, where he often writes poems on the streets and avenues. He is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (2020), Southness (2016), and Swimming Home (2015), as well as the translator of The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (2004). He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (2002), and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in Apollo, Art in America, ARTnews, Brooklyn Rail, and Poetry Project Newsletter. As curator of the Readings in Contemporary Poetry series at Dia Art Foundation, Katz edited the eponymous anthology with Dia in 2017.
