Events

Eileen Myles and Lisa Robertson
Reading

Saturday September 18, 2010 at 2:00pm
READ Books at the Charles H. Scott Gallery

Join READ Books at the Charles H. Scott Gallery on Saturday September 18 for readings by two celebrated contemporary poets, Eileen Myles and Lisa Robertson. Eileen Myles will read from her brand new book Inferno: A Poet’s Novel published by Or Books in New York. Lisa Robertson will read from her most recent book of poems R’s Boat published by the University of California Press earlier this year.

Eileen Myles is a New York-based poet, writer, and critic. She has been called “the rock star of modern poetry” by BUST Magazine and “a cult figure to a generation of post-punk female writer-performers” by the New York Times.

“Myles basically talks shit in skinny columns and calls them poems. Thing is she has one of the savviest voices and most restless intellects in contemporary lit—honest, jokey, paranoid, sentimental, mean, lyrical, tough, you name it.”
—Dennis Cooper, Artforum

Canadian poet and essayist Lisa Robertson returns to Vancouver from San Francisco, where she taught at the California College for the Arts, to be Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University this fall.

“Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.” —Village Voice

"The Office for Soft Architecture is a poet's fiction, a poet's dream—utopia, what used to be called a manifesto. Robertson's trope is exactly what we need to see whapping in the air, and, as the vastness of her international conceit reminds us, it is the air."
—Eileen Myles, The Nation

"A pocket-size extravagance, a decoder ring, a gorgeous megadose of genius prose and apposite quotation. This book will make you smarter and more beautiful. We say, on almost every page and with utmost reverence, Holy shit."
—Village Voice (about The Office for Soft Architecture in VV’s Favorite Books of 2004)

Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles’ books include Inferno: A Poet’s Novel (2010), The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009) Sorry, Tree (2007), Tow, written with artist Larry C. Collins, (2005), Skies (2001), on my way (2001), Cool for You (2000), School of Fish (1997), Maxfield Parrish (1995), Not Me (1991), and Chelsea Girls  (1994). In 1995, with Liz Kotz, she edited The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading.

From 1984 through 1986 Myles was Artistic Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York City. She conducted an openly lesbian write-in campaign for President of the US in 1992. In 2004 she wrote the libretto for the opera Hell, composed by Michael Webster.

Myles is a Professor Emeritus of Writing & Literature at University of California, San Diego where she taught from 2002 to 2007.  In Spring 2010 she was the Hugo Writer at University of Montana in Missoula. In November of 2010 she will be Fannie Hurst Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She contributes to a wide number of publications including Art Forum, Parkett, The Believer, Vice, Cabinet, The Nation, TimeOut, Book Forum and AnOther Magazine.

Myles received an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Art Writers' grant for Iceland. The Poetry Society of American awarded her the Shelley Prize in 2010.

Lisa Robertson

Lisa Robertson’s books of poetry include R's Boat (2010), Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip (2009), The Men (2006), Rousseau's Boat (2004),Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003), The Weather (winner of the Relit Award for Poetry in 2002), Debbie: An Epic (nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1998), and XEclogue (1993). Her prose has appeared in Cabinet, Front, Jacket, Mix, Collapse, Nest magazine, and many art catalogs and monographs.

Robertson maintained the Office for Soft Architecture from 1996 to 2003 as an apparatus for lyrical research.

In Fall 2006 Robertson was Roberta C. Holloway lecturer in the Practice of Poetry, University of California, Berkeley. She was visiting poet at the American University of Paris in Spring 2005 and visiting poet at University of California, San Diego in Spring 2003. In 1999 Robertson was Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University.