paper trail

Eileen Myles on poetry now

Eileen Myles

Who wouldn’t want to eavesdrop on a conversation between Alexander Chee and Eileen Myles? But this one especially seems designed to cheer the rest of us up: “I feel there’s a revolution going on,” Myles says, “like the road saga of the 50s and 60s for boys might be writing poetry for females right now. And I just love how poetry seems to be totally. . . the notebook is open—girls, and girlboys, young people and older people and all kinds of people are writing in it. Something special, mortal, cheap and fun, a new way of being smart and fast—it coincides with texting, and social media—it’s a leaky, glittering sort of form.”

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey claimed at a conference recently that the company "stands for speaking truth to power"—which wouldn’t be of much interest except that he simultaneously implied that Politwoops, the delightful service that until earlier this year allowed us to track politicians’ deleted tweets, might be allowed to return.

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas has just opened its Gabriel García Márquez archive to researchers and will hold a symposium next week.

Juliet Jacques recommends the beginnings of a library of books by trans-identified authors.

Yet more praise for the unaccountably modest critic George Scialabba.

Tonight at NYU, there’ll be a conversation about Michel Houellebecq’s Submission between Emily Apter, Lorin Stein (who translated it), and Bookforum’s former editor Eric Banks (who reviews it in a forthcoming issue).