Eileen Myles is a New York poet, maybe the New York poet, a swaggering troubadour of casually roving brilliance. Born in 1949, a third-generation participant in the New York School of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, they (“they” is Myles’s preferred pronoun) have written more than 20 books, which rollick between novel, memoir, poetry and art criticism. Like I Love Dick, by Myles’s friend Chris Kraus, these loping experiments in autofiction have hit new audiences in the last few years. Myles’s 1994 non-fiction novel Chelsea Girls was republished in 2015 to ecstatic reviews and round-the-block queues at readings. That same winter, the television series Transparent featured a lesbian poet modelled on the author. “My shirts are tighter,” Myles observed.
Afterglow is Myles’s dog book, a work of surpassing strangeness that takes the form of an elegy for a lost pet and converts it into a weird and agitated philosophical inquiry into – well, love, life, death, the bardo states in between, plaid, pathetic art, Manichaeism, lost parents, animal vision, alcoholism, Ireland, gender, ecstasy and grief.
The voice is chatty and demotic, perpetually ventriloquising, avid to sample different tones. Myles is a past master of the digression, a distractible dog, taking tangents that extend across galaxies (my favourite concerns George Bush’s true identity as an alien snake queen, impregnated in the White House). There is a transcript of a lecture on foam, snatches of poems, a script for a talk show featuring a dead dog and a wooden puppet called Oscar.
But mostly Afterglow is about Rosie, the black and white pit bull bitch who was Myles’s long-serving companion. Born on a sidewalk, or maybe a rooftop, in the East Village, Rosie was a true street dog, dressed in a yellow raincoat: a hater of puppies, a lover of the ocean, “my dog … mainstay of my liturgy for sixteen point five almost seventeen years”.
What is the love for an animal, especially if the animal outlasts intimate human relations? What is this constant companionship, conducted on a level other than speech? “It’s like an eternally silent child. Who you trust. Who shouldn’t trust you. Who keeps playing with the same ball and likes the same walk and is getting old.”
There are definitely dog anecdotes here, if that’s your bag, most startlingly an account of Myles’s attempt to get Rosie studded by a stranger’s handsome dog on a rainy summer night in New York City. No one but Myles could have written this scene, with its indelible oddness, its cartoonish unease. Two pit bulls, one muzzled, “their huge jaws slack, hanging open, panting in unison like big smiles wavering in the night”. The humans sit on the sidelines, ashamed, shifty, gratified. “It was sex that was impossible to ignore, yet bureaucratic somehow.”
But Rosie isn’t just a prop, and though she doesn’t get pregnant she’s generative in other ways. Maybe this isn’t a memoir, but a wild riff on authorship, especially the vexed business of how to get the world on to the page still wet. After all, when one is writing one is necessarily sequestered from the party. “The writer spends her life reducing her own existence to that of a ghost. All the vitality floods on to the page while her own existence grows wanner and thinner.”
What better companion then than a dog, nose to the ground, alert to the stinky messages of the day? “So yeah I taught her to write,” Rosie growls, narrating from the afterlife. “I wrote virtually every poem by Eileen Myles from 1999 to 2006.” It isn’t just material she provides, but a way of being, of getting inside the moment rather than narrating after the event is dead and gone.
Myles is a consummate verbal performer, a rock star of the spoken word. Out on walks with the dog, the writer began to play around with recording, using a phone and a video camera to try to find a way of writing then and there. “The live listening to myself in the sensorium, me here in the world in the park, yammering.” The yank on the leash a return, the dog’s butt vanishing into long grass.
But Rosie wasn’t just writing the poems. Her influence went further than that. Myles first realised that “dog was god” when Rosie was dying in San Diego. She was incontinent, and as Myles went through the hourly ritual of washing and drying her “doggy ass”, mopping piss off the hardwood floors, Myles saw that dog and god were one, that the animal dying in the front room was Myles’s teacher, not in a hokey guru way but offering direct transmission all the same. Here it was at last: love as attendance, love not as self-abnegation but giving yourself up to care.
An alcoholic, Myles had spent time in meetings, drinking coffee and chewing cookies on grey metal chairs, trying to figure out how to turn your will and life over to the care of God as you understand Him. Everyone struggled with it, how to envisage a god that wasn’t the old punitive vision in the clouds. But what if God was dog, right here right now, as immediate and joyous, as wriggly and irrepressible as a grinning pit bull?
In the 1990s, Myles used to take Rosie, then a puppy, to the meetings, strictly against the rules. For years Myles never spoke, never surrendered to the group. The Damascene moment came when the poet was as usual “deep in my process of sculpting a moving response to the speaker, up in my head like a depressed light house keeper”. Suddenly Myles realised Rosie had been absent for a while. The speaker called on Myles just as the appalling thought occurred that the puppy might have pooped on the floor, and so for the first time the author blurted out what had come to mind, to a wave of laughter from the room. “I had shared my vision with them for the first time … and my wanting and my trying and my desiring was over at last and now I was finally in.”
It was this kind of unguarded immediacy that was Rosie’s central lesson – and maybe also what Myles had been thirsting for during the years of drinking. Myles has a way of moving very freely and speculatively around a subject, a few cold facts at the core. The desire to drink was something like a blind hankering for communion, release, and also a way of blotting out loss.
It was not unconnected, then, to the death of Myles’s father, also an alcoholic, who fell off a roof and died soon afterwards, when the author was a small, gender-indeterminate child. “I asked my mother once if she thought Rosie was dad,” says Myles, and though the answer was no, the writer remained convinced that their father had somehow returned to them as a dog, “because I believe he simply liked me very much”.
Despite all the free-association, the surface thrills, this is a book that revolves around loss, that is absolutely about presence and absence in their total as well as partial forms. Rosie herself went out slowly. She started having fits, her back legs gave out, she was covered in sores. She couldn’t eat, she was barely breathing, and at last Myles took her to the vet just after dawn, when the waiting room would be empty. Rosie was hand-fed a carne asada, her eyes enormous, her jaws still working, and then the vet gave her a lethal injection. Loss on loss, “It was all her black and white my father’s touchable body”, the absent commas rolling it up into a single cataclysmic event.
Other dogs followed, but this one was the teacher, a father at the least in showing her supposed owner how to be a live animal, awake in time. Try to find a love song that declares itself better than this: “I was very wedded to how you were in the world because you held me there with you in the frame.” Or later: “You were always my boat. You bought me space and peace. I put you in the middle of my life and you never steered me wrong.”
- Afterglow by Eileen Myles (Atantic Books, £14.99). To order a copy for £12.74, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
