Class, Crisis, and the Commons in Eileen Myles’ Late Work

Eileen Myles grew up in a working-class Irish-Polish family in Middlesex County and Boston, Massachusetts. Formative familial experiences – of the institutionalisation of her grandmother in a state psychiatric hospital as recounted in Cool for You (2000), for example, or her alcoholic father’s ‘magic feeling’ – are important sources for their autobiographical prose writing. This article argues that, in the lyric poems published in the last decade, and in the evolution collection (2018) in particular, Myles has returned to experiences of emotional labour and emotions about labour in their evocations of personal and collective action. The article will be especially interested in the framing of the lyrical turn and apostrophic address, or the turning away from or to collective struggles, which will be framed in the context of Myles’s own losses in respect to changing class identity and what Pierre Bourdieu calls transfuge de classe. Poems like the staccato ‘Sharing Fall’, which begins ‘I lost / my loss / in a collective / of loss’, and the part-ekphrastic ‘While You Live Here (after Robin Bruch)’ engage with questions of patriotism, neighbourliness, and ‘pulling back’ from, and forming new, social commitments during the post-occupy period and Trump presidency. Above all, this article will ask how Myles’s distinct use of the lyric form, with its compact lineation and obscure modes of address, open out to those who suffer the crises of homelessness, precarious employment, and social exclusion in the United States.