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On the night of October 24th, in a dimly lit, tightly packed room in SE Portland, Eileen Myles read from their poetry collection, Bird Watching and Their First Three Books of Poetry. Alongside writers Rae Armantrout and poupeh missaghi, Myles read in celebration of Fonograf Editions’ 10th anniversary. Fonograf Editions is a Portland-based nonprofit press and literary record label, whose first publication was an audio release/vinyl of Myles’ Aloha/Irish Trees, a live and candid reading of new and old poems, recorded at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Before the event, Fonograf’s founder, Jeff Alessandrelli, told me how the press originated from a few cold emails he sent to authors he admired, the first of which went to Myles and Armantrout. “Eileen and Rae’s writing,” Alessandrelli said at the event, “literally changed my life.” He was not the only one in the audience who felt this way. 

Like many a young dyke, my first experience reading Myles’ writing was significant. At eighteen, a friend of mine bought me Chelsea Girls, Myles’ first autobiographical novel, chronicling stories of growing up in Massachusetts and living as a poet in the Lower East Side. I was quickly drawn to the honesty and grittiness in their work. Myles tells stories in a raw and direct vernacular that they’ve become famous for. Reading their poetry is like having a prolonged conversation on a New York stoop – it’s intimate and witty, with just enough gaps on the page to keep you wondering. 

As an early twenty-something, it was comforting to hear Myles read from Bird Watching, a poem written when they were 28 and still figuring out what it meant to be a person. The poem takes place during the “green lesbian summer / or rock ‘n roll summer” of 1978. Myles wrote it over the span of a few months while living in an apartment on East 3rd Street in Manhattan. Their apartment faced a cemetery where birds congregated and green leaves fell. Myles considers their money, writing, and relationship problems while looking at this scene. They write humorous and relatable lines such as, “I’m in love with / about 3 people / right now / all women / and I’m unlucky in that / sort of thing / which must be true / otherwise I’d have to consider myself / a fuck-up.” 

Bird Watching was transcribed into the book from original type written pages, with lots of space in the margins and between stanzas. Space and humor were both important to Myles while writing. In their forward, they write, “I think poems, a poem, this poem, are a certain container of time, like a big shirt and I sat in it because I could and I laughed.” It was a joy to be in the audience of this reading, to sit in their “big shirt” from 1978 and laugh along with them.  

In a Paris Review feature on Fonograf from 2017, Carson Vaughan wrote that “to hear Myles reading their poems on vinyl—the static and silence between poems, between lines, their voice quickly swallowed by the studio walls—is a ghostly, lonely experience, like reading a trunk of old letters from the recently deceased.” In the dark, wood-paneled room of Atrium Movement & Events, this ghostly, lonely experience was recalled with new words and new music. While talking to the birds from their window, Myles considers the mundane, banal, and isolating experiences of being a 28 year old lesbian, in a city away from their hometown, in a “comparatively boring period in history.” These competing emotional experiences converge to make the poem feel that much more human. 

To to the left of Myles onstage was Marcus Fischer, an ambient musician and sound artist, playing the electric guitar. While Myles read about the confusion of their late twenties, Fischer used a tuning fork and small metal rods to play with sound, creating a continuous echoey effect around Myles’ voice. This collaboration felt fitting with the recurring theme of the collection, bird sound. Like the birds in front of the East 3rd Street apartment, Fischer’s guitar added peripheral meaning without interrupting Myles’ thoughts.

In addition to Bird Watching, Myles’ recently published collection contains previously published manuscripts, The Irony of the Leash (Jim Brodey Books, 1978), A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains (Power Mad Press, 1981) and Sappho’s Boat (Little Caesar Press, 1982). Myles’ first book of poetry, The Irony of the Leash, was written and mimeographed at St. Mark’s Church, a true small press, DIY project. While Myles describes A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains as an attempt to play with all of the ways you can write an autobiography, Sappho’s Boat is full of lesbian love poems. Since there are only 500 or less original copies of each of these texts, Fonograf’s republication makes them accessible to a wider range of readers.

Fonograf editions is still fundraising for support of future publishing projects. Donating allows the press to continue putting out 7-9 projects a year. You can donate here.