A Postcard from Eileen Myles:

"Whether you’ve been writing poems for a while, or are just dropping in from fiction or visual art, of just have an abiding love or disdain for poetry, I have a workshop for you.

I think about my favorite definition of "postmodernism" which is that all styles apply and the only real time is now. We’ll look at different sorts of poetry throughout history–traditional, avant-garde, language, slam, personal, and revelatory–and see how, like moving through a thrift shop, we can pick up what we like and see what’s ours. We’ll also think about film as something that helps us to leap associatively on the page.

Anticipate in-class writing, walk-away assignments, and critique of one another, as well as the total exercise of much enthusiasm for reading, writing, and reinventing this compact and spiffy form."

The workshop takes place the weekend of February 21-24.

Eileen Myles is probably America’s best-known unofficial poet. Her latest book is Sorry, Tree in which she describes "some nature" as well as the transmigration of souls from the east coast to the west.

Eileen arrived in New York after graduating from college in Boston. She became friends with Allen Ginsberg, and became a notable part of the turbulent punk and art scene that animated Manhattan’s East Village, giving her first reading at CBGB’s in 1974.

A virtuoso performer of her work, Myles has published more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, articles, plays and libretti, including Hell (an opera with composer Michael Webster) Skies, on my way, Cool for You, School of Fish, Maxfield Parrish, Not Me, and Chelsea Girls.

In 1995, with Liz Kotz, Myles edited The New Fuck You/Adventures in Lesbian Reading. In 1992, she conducted an openly female write-in campaign for President of the United States. She has been a professor of writing at the University of California, San Diego since 2002. She also blogs weekly on art at http://openfordesign.msn.com/