For Now by Eileen Myles
Publisher: Yale University Press
Year: 2020
Format: Hardcover
Edition: First
Condition: New
In this third Why I Write volume, poet and writer Eileen Myles addresses the social, political, and aesthetic conditions that shape their work.
In this meditation, Eileen Myles offers a glimpse into creativity’s immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbours, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time.
For Myles, time’s “optic quality” is what enables writing in the first place—as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologised vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process.