Eileen Myles, "Pathetic Literature" (Grove Press, 2022) - New Books Network

Podcast Summary

New Books Network: Interview with Eileen Myles on “Pathetic Literature” (Grove Press, 2022)

Date: December 1, 2025
Host: Hal Coase
Guest: Eileen Myles

Overview

This episode features poet, novelist, and celebrated literary figure Eileen Myles in conversation with host Hal Coase about their anthology Pathetic Literature (Grove Press, 2022). The discussion delves into the concept of the “pathetic” in literature, how Myles curated the anthology, their influences, the shifting meaning of "pathetic," and the ambiguous, open-ended nature of both the book and the community it represents. The episode explores ideas of form, queerness, time, and devotion in literature, blending personal storytelling with literary theory.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Eileen Myles’ Literary Journey and Community

Origins as a Poet and Writer – Myles recounts their move to NYC in the 1970s with the intention of becoming a poet and the vibrant, permissive literary community they found (02:29).
Influential Communities – They describe a "tribe" of writers drawn to experimentation, queerness (broadly defined), and fringe culture, referencing figures like John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Samuel Delaney, and New Narrative writers (03:15–06:00).
Pathetic as Distinction – The term “pathetic” became a badge of experimental, boundary-breaking, often marginalized literature and writers (06:41).

Quote:
"I think always, I mean, I'm very much a writer who was born in a community and a community of others. …It always felt like kind of a permissive tribe of weirdos. And that was a way to define my taste." – Eileen Myles [04:42]

2. The Genesis and Meaning of “Pathetic Literature”

Evolving the Concept – Myles traces the lineage of the term "pathetic," noting its shifting connotations from meaning to insult, and cites a 1990s art show “Pathetic Masculinity" as an important touchstone (06:41–08:45).
From Seminar to Anthology – The notion was born in Myles' graduate seminar at UCSD; assembling Valerie Solanis, Delaney, Walser, and others. The class “was received very enthusiastically” and became a “pathetic conference” memorable for its chaos and humor (08:55–10:05).
Pandemic Assembly – The COVID-19 pandemic provided time and focus for assembling the anthology, with Myles “picking a writer every day” and embracing the project as “discipline” and “counting thing” (09:20).

Quote:
“It was a perfect thing. I was in Marfa…and I started to edit the pathetic book in that time. It was a very counting thing, who will I pick a writer every day, you know, and throw them into the book.” – Eileen Myles [09:33]

3. Criteria: What Makes Writing “Pathetic”?

Pleasurable Perversity of Selection – Selections are highly personal, sometimes surprising both editor and readers (10:44). Myles realized, for example, that Kathy Acker’s work had “big pots of pathetic” despite not being an obvious choice, and Borges was included after rediscovering him during the pandemic (10:44–12:30).
Organizing Reality – Myles links pathetic literature to “ramshackle piles of things” shaped by the internet and chance, matching the protean, boundary-crossing drive they see at the core of the pathetic (11:40–12:40).
"Pathetic" as Uncontainable – Any piece of literature could be considered pathetic by finding the “turn that struck you”; it’s about boundary-crossing, mess, and deeply felt outsiderness (12:30–13:30).

Quote:
"It is a very personal anthology…because of the Internet and the way we organize reality now, I think we're all these weird, ramshackle piles of things, you know. And I think pathetic really meets that kind of…organizing reality." – Eileen Myles [11:41]

4. Qualities and Ambiguities of the Pathetic

Big and Small, Facing the “Hovering Monolith” – The pathetic is liminal: pressing against but not quite breaching boundaries, “facing up to something that can't be faced up to” (13:50).
Queerness and “Normal” – Pathetic work resists binaries; it’s not “normal or abnormal” but “whatever normal can't get a hold of” [16:02–16:11].
Troubled, Motivated Texts – Many works are “troubled by something they can't quite get into” but this tension propels their creation, making the pathetic a “queer feeling” (16:11–16:33).

5. The Thread of Time

Disrespecting and Killing Time – Myles and Coase discuss how many anthology pieces play with the flow of time. Literature as “wasting” time, asserting a unique “time code,” and finding richness in erratic textual pacing (16:35–19:30).
Geographical Time Codes – Myles compares Marfa and New York’s “time codes,” explaining how open, “always unraveling” time in Marfa fostered the anthology’s creation (18:36–19:30).

Quote:
“So much personality and literature is…a time code. That's what one recognizes in work and often decides whether to consume it or not based on your ability to endure that time code.” – Eileen Myles [17:17]

6. Devotion & Anthology as Practice

Devotional Reading – The book can be dipped into over time: “I would also dare such a word as devotional because…the book and the concept is devoted to that kind of composition” (20:03).

7. Form: Diary, Letter, and Genre-Bending

Preference for Unique Forms – The anthology favors work whose “formal quality was unique, not easily defined as this or that” (22:50).
Editorial Lightness – Myles resists the canonizing, policing role of most anthologies, encouraging readers to imagine their own additions or omissions (24:40).

Quote:
“I really like the idea that it makes the reader feel like they are…they could be the editor…that they have text that they would slip in or imagine as part of its continuity.” – Eileen Myles [24:40]

8. Performance, Reception, and Pathetic Happenings

Live Events as Extension – Myles describes organizing performance events (the “pathetic happening”) as central to the book’s life, staging marathon readings at St. Mark’s and elsewhere, fostering collective and performative experiences (25:56–27:45).
Critical and Commercial Understatement – Despite lively events, the book was largely ignored by major US/UK literary outlets, a fate Myles finds fittingly “pathetic”—in the best sense (28:48).

Quote:
“It was a party. This is…a collective experience. Everybody will come out for this…I knew that it was inherently a performance's book.” – Eileen Myles [26:15]
“That seems pretty fittingly pathetic or…end for…[the book].” – Hal Coase [28:48]

9. What’s Next for Eileen Myles

Big Novel in Progress – Myles is working on a novel begun in 2013, planning to make “a thousand page book” and confront the challenge of scale and stillness by living in Marfa for a year (29:34–30:26).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“It just… It just… It’s vague and it’s either… Sometimes it feels parental, the way childhood was just this incredibly tingly space that was always being marshaled by these adult figures… And yet that tingly thing, I think, is something that drives so much…” – Eileen Myles [14:17]
“And that’s also for me really, where the weather, like queerness comes on. Not kind of... normal or abnormal; it’s just kind of whatever normal can’t get a hold of.” – Hal Coase [16:02]
“I think it really like the idea that it makes the reader feel like they are... they could be the editor, you know... they would imagine as part of its continuity.” – Eileen Myles [24:40]
“I have... my own experience as a writer is that when a book comes out, nothing happens.” – Eileen Myles [27:00]
“Thank you so much.” – Hal Coase [30:26]

Important Timestamps

[02:29] — Eileen Myles on their start as a poet and entrance into NYC literary scene
[06:41] — Discussion of the word “pathetic” and “Pathetic Masculinity”
[09:20] — Pandemic as the moment to assemble the anthology
[10:44] — On surprising inclusions in the anthology (Acker, Borges, etc.)
[13:50] — “Big vs. small”: definitions and contradictions of pathetic
[16:02] — Queerness and “normal”; texts as troubled, driven by the unspeakable
[17:17] — Literature, personality, and time codes
[20:03] — The anthology as “devotional” text
[22:50] — Forms in the anthology and genre resistance
[24:40] — Reader as potential editor; openness of the anthology
[25:56–27:45] — Live “pathetic happening” readings and performance as practice
[28:48] — Book’s low mainstream reception as “fittingly pathetic”
[29:34] — Next project: a monumental novel
[30:26] — Closing thanks and reflections

Final Thoughts

This interview uncovers Pathetic Literature as a rebellious, unruly celebration of outsider writing and feeling—work that cherishes vulnerability, mess, and the power of failed or porous boundaries. Myles shares both the practicalities and deep philosophies behind the anthology, emphasizing its open-ended, personal nature and its grounding in performance, community, and ongoing conversation. The podcast itself reflects the spirit of the anthology: lively, accessible, and quietly radical.

Transcript

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Podcast Host/Announcer (1:30)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Hal Coase (1:34)

Hello and welcome to New Books in Poetry. My name is Hal Coase and today I'm really, really excited to be talking to Eileen Miles about their new anthology, Pathetic Literature, out last year from Grove Press. The anthology contains over 100 pathetic contributions to literature from the last 1,000 years. And they're from all over the world and they're all over the place. It's a self described sex club of thought with jokes. Eileen, who edited this anthology, is a poet and writer whose books include Chelsea Girls For Now, I Must Be Living Twice New and Selected Poems and Afterglow A Dog Memoir. They ran for President of the United States in 1992. Hi Eileen, thanks for being here. How are you doing?

Eileen Miles (2:18)

I'm good Hal. This is fun. I'm glad we got here.

Hal Coase (2:22)

Could you start by telling us a little bit about you, what you do and how you came to land on pathetic as a badge of distinction.

Eileen Miles (2:29)

Okay, interesting. So I mean I'm a self defined poet and I've been such a person for I guess about 50 years. You know, I came to New York in the 70s with the very intention of becoming a poet and quickly got Into a world of writers that made it very possible. And I thrived in it. And my writing life became more complicated in good ways. Doing various. Everything from performance art to journalism to theater to Myrtle libretti, and started writing novels. Once I stopped drinking and drugging so much that it was only a thought and an aspiration. It became. I'd be able to. Became able to realize longer projects. But I think. I think always, I mean, I'm very much a writer who was born in a community and a community of others. And, you know, the way American poetry was when I arrived in it, you know, like, say I went to St Mark's Church, which as an institution, we defined ourselves in the 70s as the sort of the church of kind of the avant garde or America of American alternative poetry. But experience, you know, and it included people like John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg. And, you know, it was kind of queer in a way, but not queer necessarily around homosexuality or queerness, but just there was just another tradition, you know, that had a lot of connections to art and culture. So we saw ourselves as very central. But I think as culture has shifted and gotten more mainstream, I started to be defined more as experimental and. But there was just basically, it always felt like kind of a permissive tribe of weirdos. And that was a way to define my taste. And even before I knew anybody, I found people like Newt Hampson, who was about, you know, a writer, a Scandinavian writer who was about starving him. So only. Only, you know, only eating if he made his money from writing. And, you know, people who were devoted to odd experiments that were performative in a certain way and in living in particular. Maybe, I don't know, to me, I mean, like interesting and purposeful lives, but others might call them fringe. And so that, you know, so I think that wittingly or unwittingly, I found myself in a community of such writers. Like my peers in San Francisco were poets who wanted to write about sex. And so they kind of joined under a band called New Narrative. And that includes, very loosely, everybody from Kathy Acker to Robert Gluck to Dodi Bellamy to Kevin Killian, somebody, you know, a writer like Samuel Delaney, who was a sci fi writer and a queer writer, was always part of our tribe. The Boston poet John Wieners and. And, you know, and in the art world. Well, was it in the art world? No, actually, through a book dealer, I discovered a really important writer for me, Robert Walser, the Swiss writer, who, you know, took these walks and constructed narratives in very stray and gathered ways. So. So I Was always excited by writers who did unusual methods of composition. And I love. I came up in the era of Andy Warhol, who was about recording and divulging and fandom and excessive feelings and being very devoted to American pop culture in a certain way and. And also avant garde duration. So I think. So there was a. There was a well of taste, you know, that led me to pathetic. And I think, you know, and I think, you know, the book tells us, but I think I discovered. I mean, I was always aware of the word and it just got meaner as time passed in my lifetime And. But come the 90s, it had a. It had a short association through the critic Ralph Rugoff, who curated a show called Pathetic Masculinity in Los Angeles. And it included people like Mike Kelly and Tony Osler, but guys who were doing weird things with gender and kind of personal work in a way, you know, but theorized personal work. And I think it became a joke with some friends, mostly female feminist friends, that they were actually reinventing feminism for men, you know, and because. And these guys had been taught by feminists and Cal Arts and you know, I mean, like some of the history is loose, but I think it's pretty true. So I adopted the term and start, I think by the. By the arts. I was briefly a professor at UCSD and I. One of my powers was to teach a literary seminar, you know, to graduate students. And I had never taken. Taught a literary. I've neither gone to graduate school nor taught a seminar. But I thought, okay, this is the time to invent pathetic literature. And so I had a class and I made the first gathering of Valerie Solanis and Delaney and. And Walser and John Wieners and made, you know. And it was received very enthusiastically. And we just had so much fun with the word and the language. And we had a pathetic conference and it was so scarcely attended and everything fucked up and it was really funny and great and so it just lurked in it. And it migrated into a book of mine, Afterglow, which was about my dog at that same time who was dying in San Diego. And. And I think at some point I. I connected how. I mean, I, you know, I tend to. When I write books, when I construct books, I often drop in other texts that I'm obsessed with and decide the book will make a home for this. And, and that's what the book often grows around the text that is, you know, migrated into it. So an aspect of pathetic literature came into the dog book. And my then wonderful young writer editor Zach Pace at Grove said you should do an anthology of pathetic literature. And my agent was trying to. I mean, the whole thing. It's so funny how things happen in books. My agent was trying to. I'm the kind of writer that I have a reputation, but I never get money for my books. I mean, I get little, little tiny bits of money and I, you know, I make a living. I survive, But. So he was trying to construct a book deal that was like four books so that I could get something from the press. And so pathetic, you know, weaseled its way into my contract. And it was a book that I thought I would do someday. But the Pandemic became that day because it was a perfect thing. I was in Marfa, where I am right now, and I had been working on a novel. And it was very hard to keep focused during the Pandemic, at least at first. And so I found that the time that I was in that was really so glorious and excessive was really good for writing poetry. And I started to edit the pathetic book in that time because it just. It was. It was a little discipline. It was a very counting thing. Who will I. I would pick a writer every day, you know, and throw them into the book. And I had lots of time. I read. I read Borges for the first time.