Laura reviews Sister Spit edited by Michelle Tea

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In the introduction to Sister Spit: Writing, Rants & Reminiscence from the Road, editor Michelle Tea proudly writes that Sister Spit is what she did instead of college. Reading this collection is like digging through a pile of her study group’s crumpled looseleaf notes at the end of the semester. It’s enough to get the gist of the lesbian-feminist-trans-vegan-poet-artist-addict-activist-adventurer curriculum, but by no means will you gain any mastery of it. You’ll just wish you’d enrolled in the classes, then lie awake at night questioning every major life decision you’ve ever made. In a good way. Really.

Sister Spit was formed in 1994, when Tea and Sini Anderson created a girls-only open mic night to get away from the Bukowski-worshipping bros dominating the San Francisco literary scene. Their show ran every Sunday for two straight years before they picked it up and hit the road. Together, Tea and Anderson led a roving band of queer poets and storytellers across the country in couple ramshackle rental vans, stopping in a new city every night to give live performances.

“Most Sister Spit shows are about class,” writes Tea. “About class and being female, or about class and not being female, about being trans, a faggot. There is feminism in everything, a punkness too.” The same gut feeling is also true for the works contained in Sister Spit (the book), and it is a pleasure to read.

Covering 15 years of Sister Spit’s best work, this anthology shows incredible range. The collection starts off strong from the very first piece: “Star,” a violent, bitchy, improper, fabulous poem by Samuel Topiary. A little further in, I loved “Training for Goddesses,” in which the hilarious Kat Marie Yoas describes her experiences at a dominatrix training camp. And “Real Paper Letter” by Tamara Llosa-Sandor was funny and wonderful in a gentler, contemplative sort of way.

My favorite piece of writing in Sister Spit is “High Five for Ram Dass” by Harry Dodge. Consider:

Chuck Mangione, Late Zeppelin and a Streisand are stuffed under the bleachers in a throbbing gyroscopic heap. Late Zeppelin’s head is banging into the aluminum bench at a pace that makes me feel like doing “The Bus Stop.” I watch them for a long minute and the crickets rev up their nighttime calypso. Buttes the color of ash and pumpkin ascend until mercifully, they eclipse the sun. A totally relaxing primal event. I feel looser. The air is soft, exactly the temperature of my skin and fragrant to boot. Orange blossoms. Tuna. Whimpers, screams, yells replace the metallic fuck-gonging and before long the trio emerges into the soft dark night smiling. Stumbling on loose hips.

Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s from a story about formerly feral children resynthesizing into contemporary culture.

Perhaps my least favorite segments in Sister Spit were the ones “from the road.” I found the constant name dropping to be distracting and annoying. Still, I loved reading the tales. I love knowing that these people — interesting, creative, inventive and resourceful as they are — existed and exist. I love that they’ve documented their stories and that I can access them whenever I want. And, okay, “Where Is My Soul?” with Cristy C. Road’s reflections from the road, equal parts inspirational and relatable, are pretty wonderful. “How do you do this?” she asks. “How do you grow so gracefully, achieving levels of confidence and success while maintaining your grit and spirit? Your anger and identity? How do I become Eileen Myles?” Oof. This. Or alternatively, how do I become Michelle Tea?

Sister Spit’s Spring 2013 literary tour begins in just a few short weeks! For a full list of tour stops, check out the City Lights website.

Anna K. reviews Inferno: A Poet’s Novel by Eileen Myles

Poet and former artistic director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project Eileen Myles—who is also a lesbian, although “lesbian poet” is an identity with which her protagonist grapples—presents Inferno as “a poet’s novel,” but what keeps it from nonfiction is unclear. It reads as a rambling, associative, nonlinear memoir of her career, as she name-drops from 1970s Greenwich Village to Germany (via reading tour with Semiotext[e]). On her website, Myles explains thatInferno “chronicles the adventures of a female writer in hell very much like Eileen Myles. Inferno is actually a künstlerroman,” a type of bildungsroman that portrays an artist’s development.

The second part of the novel is presented as a grant proposal, complete with an abstract. Yet the style and form do not change (except for the occasional self-conscious note on whether what she’s writing belongs in a grant proposal). Throughout the book, Myles embeds her poems. Although I no doubt missed much in the way of literary hearkening to Dante’s Divine Comedy and references to decades of the New York poetry scene, Myles’s writing is generally so big and beautiful that I was rewarded for powering through the only difficult part (surprisingly little amid all this timeless, sometimes placeless personal narrative)—i.e., in-depth descriptions of her plays.

Myles will teach you about life and living in such a roundabout way that you can’t help but accept her wisdom. She describes watching her dog take a shit, how her love makes her attuned to the faintest changes as her dog prepares. It’s the kind of book in which you highlight pages and scribble in the margins, only to return to the fragments and wonder what you were thinking.

The narrator relates how she became a lesbian (her phrasing) and her loves and lovers. She writes, “There’s a moment in a woman’s life when she discovers she can have sex with as many people as she wants. Suddenly everyone is a potential partner. That’s when men get in the act which is why lesbianism isn’t really a thing it’s just this unbridled lust. It’s like god. If writers are the only people, I mean the last ones who have lives lesbians are the only people who have sex.” Her descriptions of sex are artful and hot and rear up unexpectedly as the book winds to a close.

What I was left with is akin to what struck Myles’s as she read Deleuze’s Masochism: “He said the masochist habitually lays out a story, a fetishized chain of objects or events, in which the seeker must thoroughly immerse herself in order to reach the unexposed but desired conclusion. Which was…” On reading poetry, she writes, “Succumb, don’t resist. Because we do get to choose what we are succumbing to. We create worlds out of what we put into our heads. I don’t know about you. It’s why I read.”

Agreed. Succumb.

Kelly reviews Inferno by Eileen Myles

Inferno: A Poet’s Novel, Eileen Myles

If the flight from Minneapolis to Vancouver had been just a little longer, I would have finished this book in one sit. Not because of the plot—basically nonexistent—but because of the feeling, thought, feeling. Plus, the hot and sometimes hilarious sex, of course.

Though subtitled “A Poet’s Novel,” this piece is only vaguely fictional, referring to real figures from Myles’ life and incorporating previously published poems. Myles brings a poet’s precision to this semi-fiction, semi-memoir. Take these opening lines:

My English professor’s ass was so beautiful. It was perfect and full as she stood at the board writing some important word. Reality or perhaps illusion. She opened the door. With each movement of her arms and her hand delicately but forcefully inscribing the letters intended for our eyes her ass shook ever so slightly. I had never learned from a woman with a body before. Something slow, horrible and glowing was happening inside me. I stood on the foothills to heaven. She opened the door.

After introducing Dante to the class, this English professor asks students to write their own infernos. The class groans. Eileen writes hers alone at the kitchen table at home. Her professor’s public response to Eileen’s poem makes her wonder, could this poetry gig be a job? There is little plot in the book, but that is not the point. When I heard Myles speak in Vancouver, she said she wrote this book to explain being a poet. It is a thorough and provoking explanation.

In many ways, this book has nothing to do with the original Divine Comedy. Dante’s judicial nature and firm vengeance are absent; Myles is not teaching us how to be good; and other than a dose of guilt, there’s nothing Catholic about this piece. However, like Dante, Myles is a poet on a journey, through a spectacular and sometimes grotesque universe; and though there is no single Beatrice, it is women who bring Myles through. Her discovery of her sexuality is written in glorious detail: the awkwardness and the joy resonate equally.