Words matter. These are the best Eileen Myles Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If the poetry world celebrate its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.
Everybody loved me running for president in ’91 and ’92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before.
Lyndon Johnson, I know for a fact, was a great president. And I don’t mean by that he was a great man.
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.
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.
When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are.
I’m not against wealth; I just think everybody should have it, same as health.
Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn’t about, and I don’t mean writing style, but cultural style.
A vote should be generative, not like business as usual, which is what voting feels like for most of us.
Somehow, the whole idea of me writing art reviews was just too much of a complicated thought, but I liked art, and later on I just realized that it would be perhaps a pleasure, and so I decided to do it for ‘Art in America’ – a lot.
The poet is like the earth’s shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down.
I really just love reading. It’s my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose.
The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.
Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
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 thought ‘Chelsea Girls’ was going to change my life.
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.
The only job that ever really worked for me was teaching because you are your own master once you get into the room. You just have to show up on time and talk about what you care about.
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 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.
Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You’re always home.
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.
I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream.
It’s a big statement if you use the word ‘America’ in the title of your poem.
I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will.
I always aimed at being a legend.
I’m the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years.
I’ve had a lifelong waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling when something good happens.
I’m proud that I’ve never stopped writing about being poor.
