and it's always being now

Planet AUTHORity - AUTHOR INTERVIEWS: "Myles: I bumped into a little zen in high school. It was in the air then, J.D. Salinger, etc. It's such a part of '60s non-academic poetry. And I began some sitting about two years ago--I haven't been doing it all lately, but that really gave me a sense of poetry as a practice as one might have a zen practice. Something one returns to continually. There's a Buddhist saying: try, try, try one thousand times. I like the notion of continuing things. I can hardly do anything that I don't think I can continue. Especially if I can pick it up and put it down and still be doing it. Something I can return to. Gertrude Stein is very zen to me.

Pearlberg: How so?

Myles: Stein's zenness refers to her loyalty to 'being.' She refers a lot to that lively thing, the animative quality in a human -- it's what she would be seeking in someone she might be making a portrait of. All in all in her explanation of literature she's obsessed with motion, movement, circulation, aliveness. I see her as connected to a particularly American sense of literature in which the expansiveness of now, not a representation of it, but it, itself in literature is the real subject. That's zen to me."


great interview with Eileen Myles over at planet authority, a new site to me.