Cuthwulf Eileen Myles

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Cuthwulf Eileen Myles was giving daily readings between September 20th - 26th, in and around the city of Svolvær. Time and location were announced at Myles’ instagram account: @eileen.myles 

My practice is vernacular in the widest sense of the work. I’m mostly a poet which I think of as a very primary art form, and my own poetry derives a lot from the handwritten captions in comic strips. I think of poems as vertical drawings. I use a china marker or sometimes a sharpie for the TOC in journals I’ve edited, my own and friends book covers, publicity for art and activist events on flyers and instagram, sometimes graffiti. Though I use a computer and earlier a typewriter I like writing by hand to keep the practice as close to the body as possible. Handwriting feels like a performance. I ran for president in 1992 which I considered a political performance (and the beginning of my activism) aspects of which arise during every election cycle. Most intimately today I’m working on a 1000 page novel called All My Loves which I’ll read from at length one day (and for ten minutes every day) while I’m in Lofoten as well as discussing global politics and I will post a handwritten telegram of my work each day I’m there. One episode of x-files begins in Lofoten I’ve noticed.

Cuthwulf Eileen Myles (b. 1949, they/them) is a poet, novelist and art journalist. They were educated at St. Marks Poetry Project in New York, ten years later became Artistic Director. a “Working Life” and Pathetic Literature (editor) are their most recent books. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls which won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel in 2023. Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). They received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing, and they are a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.