The Trip

Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently a novelist, public talker and art journalist. A Sagittarius, their twenty books include evolution (poems), Afterglow (a dog memoir), a 2017 re-issue of Cool for You, I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the PSA, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, Myles received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.

For their GIDEST seminar Eileen has shared The Trip—what they call a “puppet road film”—and a talk on their poetic and artistic practice, which they describe as a process of collecting, listing, and describing a life’s worth of things. In collaboration with puppets made in childhood, the politically charged landscape of west Texas and their characteristic wit, Eileen is proposing a variety of ways, speculative and haptic, of navigating existence by giving us the chance to stand still, move and rearrange our “favorite things,” so that, in this stillness, they might meet.