Eileen Myles Quotes

I was like the family clown. The middle child entertaining. I was a lousy student, but interestingly, the nuns always let me write plays or do drawings, endless special projects.

Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved.

I've had a lifelong waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling when something good happens.

I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there's mystery and poetry in your life - not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.

As a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carr's hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author speak - a whispering that enables us into its world ... a masterfully sutured journey, painfully useful. Sarah - Of Fragments and Lines is a book I know I will return to. And urge it on my friends who have lives too and write in them.

I love Canada, and I dated someone who was Canadian a few years ago, and she brought me into a deeper understanding of the greatness of the culture.

I think poets are supposed to be writing for television and film. I grew up in the day of early TV that was so raw and funny, and I think we're in the next important moment of television, where it's really telling the epic of the culture like Charles Dickens was doing in the 19th century with his serialized novels.

I wonder, would I have transitioned from female to male if I was 30 years younger? Possibly. But if I had been born even 30 years later, because it seems like the technology will only get better, it seems like one might not ever need to settle down at all.

Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.

I was a working-class kid from Boston. But I never lost my accent because I felt like that was what I was doing. I didn't have to perform Woody Guthrie like Bob Dylan did in the '60s, I just had to make myself be Eileen Myles and let that be my shield.

For all these reasons (...) working class intellectuals like big words and their sentence formation is excessively ornate. It's what they think of as 'smart'. Pomposity. It's an embarrassing condition of being unsophisticated and not knowing what is truly smart which is simplicity and modernism; certainly it was twenty years ago that I learned to write. But the working class person is above all afraid to seem dumb so in acting 'smart' and footnoting everything they betray the insecurity and weightiness of the unexperienced conclusion, which is an imitation of what writers are like. In general I think writers are not smart. They are something else and each writer can fill in a word here, but smart is not what that word is.

With Instagram, you're captioning a moment. Twitter is the caption without the image. Even if it's there, the words come first.

I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.

I wasn't afraid of being poor. I didn't want to live in a big house. I'm the perfect size for poetry. I can move around.

The poet's life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and days whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window. We're hunched and weaving over the keys of our green our grey or pink blue manual typewriter maybe a darker stone cold thoritative selectric with its orgasmic expectant hum and us popping pills and laughing over what you or I just wrote, wondering if that line means insult or sex. Or both. Usually both.

If boys were always trying to get in girls' pants, what did they want? What could the girls give them? Pee it seemed to me was an appropriate gift.

People loved to talk about how Frank O'Hara didn't really care about getting published. That doesn't jibe with my experience.

To be a poet, it's a challenge to do it in poverty, to do it in wealth. To do it in the academy, to do it in a relationship where you're happy. Everything changes the game. To do it in the awkward state of love, despair, dying. You just have to work it.

I always aimed at being a legend.

I didn't know how to write a novel, so I sort of let it happen in waves. The only way I could write it was to think like scenes in a movie.

Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy.

I've grown to love Barack Obama. Hillary is no Bernie Sanders. But she's a politician, and she understands Congress. And I think with that kind of twisted beauty, she could lead our country.

If passion was a substance I would say it is dark brown, and then blood red. It's like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It's warm and it stinks like shit and it's unaccountably and endlessly good. It's thick and it goes on for miles and it isn't so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. That's all you know.

I'm a poet born in the era of Andy Warhol and a generation that wanted to be famous.

If there is something I will always carry in my heart it is this earnest unwillingness to be part of the bunch,

If I had been a good student and an achiever, I might have been excited by a more systematic approach to writing than what I do.

In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special.

What happened was private. I was in it with Rose. She had hurt me grievously and now I was forever attached. I was in it now with all the women in the world. I walked home glad. I will die, I thought with a bounce in my step. I'm whole. Not whole like anyone else, but whole like me. Painful, but simple. It was very simple now.

What I started to understand was that the poem was made out of time–past, present and future. It lives in the present, it breathes there and that's how you let anyone in. I think people can feel this accessing of time in poetry very readily. As soon as the poem ceases to be about anything, when it even stops saving things, stops being such a damn collector, it becomes an invite to the only refuge which is the impossible moment of being alive.

I'm the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years.

I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff.

When people decide to talk publicly about poetry as an art form and how it's received, they often get very abject about it: "Nobody reads poetry," and then a thousand people write back, "No, we read poetry." There's an abundance of this negative preaching to the choir, and it's very similar to the experience I'm having.

The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs: you're their friend.

Everybody loved me running for president in '91 and '92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before.

Already I know it will hurt this is the hurt country

Women aren't physically afraid of men; women are genetically afraid of men. It's happened for such a long time.

Dogs are a companion species. It's about time - you have an animal for about 15, 16 years, a generation. That time holds so much. You might have had five or six relationships with human beings but one dog.

I still feel like the world is a piece of bread, I'm holding out half to you

If you have a dog, and you're a person whose moods are constantly changing, there's a moment when you look at the dog, and you feel bad for them because they're attached to you, and so it's funny for the dog to vocalize those things in some ways.

The room was the poem, the day I was in. Oh Christ. What writes my poem is the second ring, inner or outer. Poetry is just the performance of it. These little things, whether I write them or not. That's the score. The thing of great value is you. Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live.

In my family, I'm the middle of three, and I'm like a lot of middle children. I was one of those kids that floated from group to group. I liked being able to be included in all the groups - the bad kids, the smart kids.

The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous.

As a human being, I'm kind of a cheery melancholic. I have energy; I'm happy.

I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream.

Time passes. That's for sure.

(Interviews Ntozake Shange) "What do you think an artist's job is?"
"To keep our sensibilities alive, so we aren't numb by our struggles to survive. That's what I think our job is right now.

Listen, I have been educated.
I have learned about Western
Civilization. Do you know
What the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone.

Urban nature is like living with mass conditions. It sometimes feels like a myth & you are its scribe.

I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor.

I'd like to sit down with Hillary Clinton onstage and ask her about Glass Steagall and all the big banks and her own campaign contributions.

Who doesn't want to be famous? I am famous. I'm dying to be on TV.

We're basking in language itself. The silence of my friend. My love. The one beyond words in her silence. She is always eternally before. When she speaks it is shit, a gift, something to do. In our moment, of waiting, pointing, silent gear, what we went out for - that is pointing. Shit is the award. The award is shit.

Lyndon Johnson, I know for a fact, was a great president. And I don't mean by that he was a great man.

1990 was a totally political time. George Bush was president, people were dying of AIDS, a lot of our friends, and there was no money being spent by the government either on AIDS or art. So a lot of extreme sexual and political work was made at that time. It was in response to the situation. But that kind of "edgy" political work wasn't exactly what I was doing. I felt a little like my mother. I just wasn't surprised that the government wouldn't support this work. What would you expect. I had personally grown up in a world of total censorship so I wasn't surprised to see politicians wanting to take money away from the art that was explicitly talking about this entire reality of ours. It seemed like the real desire from them (the politicians) was to have no description. That's what they would have paid for. ...Doing their business, wars or whatever, behind the scenes and meanwhile propagating a giant nothing which has become a something the government and the media have only perfected since. To a very large extent people don't even know. I mean it's kind of the great product of this country. The American Way. A big nothing. A cataclysmic unawareness in the face of evil.

The poet is like the earth's shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down.

He had studied philosophy as a young man, but clay really spoke to him. I like mud, he explained. And then he went on to explain the Earth's magnetism, and why clay does stick together and it's about ions and stuff. And there are specific muds, or clays. For instance, this: red. Deep deep beautiful red. Albany slip. I stand there in awe, slipping around in worlds of specialization. The endless details, but the Earth is a big wad of it, mud. And that would be a huge start, to know that you liked it. There it is.

As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary.

Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other's hearts. I guess there's other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You're always home.

Having big audiences when you're on a book tour is like Valhalla if you're a person who used to sell Girl Scout cookies on the side. Because you want to give the reading that will sell the most books.

Certainly in the arts, in all genres, I think that men should step away. I think men should stop writing books. I think men should stop making movies or television. Say, for 50 to 100 years.

Poetry is my politics. It's an opportunity that gives me a way to speak.

When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are.

Lucifer's name means light and the reason they threw him out of heaven and he became the biggest devil and not the biggest saint anymore was what he did with language.

I'm not against wealth; I just think everybody should have it, same as health.

Nope, I am destroyed. A shattered boat of a person. A broken window here, a lousy bell there. An old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking into a book. A drippy excrescence. A schmear.

The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.

I thought 'Chelsea Girls' was going to change my life.

Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.