In the spring of 1983, the poet Eileen Myles went for a walk with their friend Tom in Manhattan. There was perhaps nothing remarkable about this walk, only that the light “clustered around the buildings” seemed particularly beautiful that day. As they sat and smoked and looked across the Hudson River towards New Jersey, two friends in their early thirties, they felt “overjoyed, overcome with the awareness that we weren’t dead.” This description of an urban scene is of a piece with many of Myles’s poems, which are so alive to dailiness and detail, to the everyday architecture of our feelings.Article continues after advertisement
I remember being floored by this description when I first encountered it in Myles’s 1999 essay “Coming Clear,” being, as it is, an essay about Myles’s sobriety, and being, as I was then, in 2022, recently thirty, and just a few weeks sober myself. I was emotional and full of gratitude in that period, eager to find representations of this new way of life, this not-being-dead.
If recovery meetings were the place to find fellowship, strength and hope, I figured that literature might offer something else, some alternate narrative frames for this first chapter of a life without drink. It was thus a joy to read Myles, one of my favorite poets, on the particularities of early recovery, how it helps illuminate new forms of attention, offers up “a whole world…all out there waiting for you, in a way it never was before.” I too had noticed, in those first few weeks, how the world seemed a little brighter, its colors more vivid.
