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I sat across from Eileen Myles at a large empty table in her London publisher’s office a few hours before a sold out reading at the Serpentine Gallery I ask her about her plans for after our interview, wondering how to begin She shrugs ‘More of the same’   Over the last twelve months, following the reissue of her out-of-print 1994 autobiographical novel Chelsea Girls and the collection I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014, there has been an almost mythical resurgence in Myles’s popularity With nineteen books of poetry and prose behind her, she is not exactly news, having been active for forty years and influenced a whole generation of radical writers and activists, but the last year has been something different From a New York Times profile (illustrated with an Inez and Vinoodh portrait of Myles in a Comme des Garçons jacket) to a television character based on her (played by Cherry Jones on the Amazon show Transparent), it has constituted a kind of initiation into the mainstream, one that Myles perhaps called best in her 1991 poem ‘Peanut Butter’: ‘All / the things I / embrace as new / are in / fact old things, / re-released’ While forty years seem like a long time even for mainstream culture to catch up with what has been there all along, it is precisely the striking, almost recalcitrant consistency of her author-character persona that resists assimilation She is the opposite of seasonal   Few artists can communicate in as bright and fluid a shorthand as Myles There is a perpetual sense of immediacy at play, a nowness maintained by a frequency of jumping between one tense or register and another in a flickering swoop At core prosodic, her writing is often generated by rhythms and inflections of speech, attesting to Myles’s ear for a particular place and time It is a poetry of appetites and human needs, of grandiosity and struggle, mediated through the running stream of personal experience Her language, often simple and prosaic, seems detachable from context while held together in a self-concealing form Attempting to pin it down is to miss the point;