The snake according to Eileen Myles

In January 1998, during a reading at the Ear Inn in New York, Eileen Myles read a poem called "Snakes." We recently "found" this poem in that reading; it hadn't been segmented and we just didn't know "Snakes" was one of the poems Myles read that day. I for one am glad of the find. It's quite an interesting poem: story-like but defiant about its story-ness, to say the least. A kind of kunstlerroman, a portrait of this particular artist as a young girl. And not surprisingly it plays with and against the powerful gendered associations of snake. Here is a link to the recording of the poem. And here is the text of the poem as it once appeared in The Massachusetts Review (in 1998).