Now in my first couple of years in New York, I did not go into the library anymore and pretty much never would again, nor had I installed a small building inside myself. Yet I needed it in my head - that quiet lurid feeling that grew and shrunk in relation to the beat of words on a page. I liked a Pentel pen. I enjoyed a long yellow legal pad and the shaky din of a manual typewriter, but these conditions had not exactly taken shape, I had not been in a groove long enough with my materials to feel I was on a road. Sliding down a dune, feeling the warm sand looking up at the sky, the blasting white sun. With the windows open. The poem flapping out of a typewriter in front of me. I made this. I am free. I had a room.

From Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles.

Books about New York…I had reached a point when I was in NYC when I could no longer read books about NYC. They seemed to reach out and strangle me. I could smell the streets and feel the press of bodies as I read, the self-glorifying undertone of so many of them. just could not, could not take it. 

But Myles’ New York is, at least in this early stage, so alien (70s-NY seems to have existed on a different plane than current-NY) that I can just love it for being the setting of her self-discovery as a poet. Her quirky, deliberately broken use of syntax is interesting too - half like recorded speech without the pauses, so it is breathless and cool and authoritative. In the way American books are, and how fiction from other English-speaking nations never seems to be, nor could. 

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