Eileen Myles has been called “our Gertrude Stein” and “a cult figure to a generation of post-punk female writer-performers.” Last night at McNally Jackson Books, I had the pleasure of hearing the iconic Myles read from her new book of essays, The Importance of Being Iceland.

Dustin Kurtz, the Coordinator of Events for the store, walked up to the mic and introduced Myles, although he also said that “she needs no introduction.” He said of her new book that the “scope of her essays is ridiculously large.”

Myles then took the mic. She laughed and said she felt comfortable with Kurtz’s description of her as “ridiculous.”  She explained how The Importance of Being Iceland is a sort of “secret-history” that most of her readers don’t know about. Some of these essays were written for publications that never came through, some for blogs, and some  just for Myles’s own creative enjoyment.

She then proceeded to read her essay, “On the Road with Bjork.” In the essay, she is in Iceland, driving to a Bjork concert. On the way, she gets into an accident. “It’s you! It was Taylor gaping at me. I was hit by a friend. It felt like good luck, not bad, certainly that we were okay, but even more that we chose to have an accident together. I am still awaiting the significance of this incident.”

She also read her essay “A Recipe for Lesbian Brain,” “Taylor Meade’s Apartment,” and a couple of blog posts and art criticisms. After the reading, there was a question and answer period. Kurtz asked about her “non sequitur” and if it take a lot of effort to write that way or if it’s what’s going on in her head. Myles said that the hard part is “to get back” from all the tangents she goes off on. “The road is littered like Taylor’s apartment.” Her sloppiness is her intention. She “juggle[s] it so you don’t get completely lost.” Myles said, “The reader should get nervous, but not very nervous. The darkness, the banishment is okay.”

Kurtz also asked Myles how she got involved in art criticism. She explained how she always loved art and how it had an energy outside of poetry. She quoted one of her friends who told her, “Don’t be a loser drug addict poet. Be an art-critic poet.”

With regard to another audience member’s question, Myles discussed how life in California is different from life in New York City. In L.A, she used time in the car as writing time with her tape recorder. When she came back to New York, she had to learn how to write poetry in a New York way all over again. And when she did learn, her poems were different from the way they were pre-CA. When an audience member asked, “How do you know if a poem is finished?”, Myles quickly responded, “If it stops shaking.”

Seeing Eileen Myles read in person was an incredibly memorable experience. When she reads, she doesn’t just read. She performs. I agree with McNally Jackson’s event page, “Myles is a literary legend you’ll have to experience in person.” True, her writing stands very well on its own. But with her performance, it became so much more of an experience.

Just as with her essays, Myles went off on tangents when she spoke. At one point, she told the audience a story about how she thinks she had sex with an artist in the ‘70‘s who is now famous, or maybe it was his brother. Either way, it was freaky sex. She joked that maybe that’s why she became a lesbian: “I think I’ll be a lesbian. It can’t be any weirder than this.” Myles even had a sense of humor about herself. When a customer in the McNally Jackson Cafe walked off after her first essay, she just laughed it off and said, “Yea, this is nice, but I’m going to go now.”

I am very glad I got to see Myles read. She even signed my two books of hers, The Importance of Being Iceland and Sorry, Tree. Myles is a very talented writer, poet, and performer. The world should have more creative geniuses like her. Our city needs talent like hers.