Eileen Myles Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Eileen Myles

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

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

Already I know it will hurt this is the hurt country — Eileen Myles

A vote should be generative, not like business as usual, which is what voting feels like for most of us. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

And how are your teeth tonight?
Can you afford to fix them? — Eileen Myles

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

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

Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy. — Eileen Myles

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

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. — Eileen Myles

I always think of childhood as the inarticulate moment, and you have your little camera. You were filming it, recording it, you just didn't know how to speak it. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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

I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose. — Eileen Myles

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

Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

The first time I voted, I voted for Eugene McCarthy and I knew he wouldn't win, but it felt so great to vote for him, to vote for the right guy - the one who wanted peace. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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

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

I wake up with a sense of wonder. I don't dread the future. I like it. — Eileen Myles

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

But if I paid attention, really paid attention maybe I could ignore the mountain of sadness and she might entertain and distract me and I would think this is life. The romance and the sadness. I am in it now. I did do that which is what happened. — Eileen Myles

All the details of my life were in exact order and yet I was tumbling in them-out of order like a tremendous wave had hit me and I was thrown off the ship and I awoke or dreaming, or dead I knew not-no I couldn't speak. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness, and that's the birth of the poem. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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

Evolution is not an even process. There are surges, and there are micromoments. Certainly a career as an artist is that way. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

Older men get lovable, and older women get monstrous. — Eileen Myles

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

I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

Because rich people need poor friends (but not too poor!) to maintain their connection to the struggle that spawned them even if they never struggled. Poor people tend to know what's going on plus they are often good-looking, at least when they are young and even later they are the cool interesting people the rich person once slept with, so the poor person always feathers the nests of the rich. — Eileen Myles

I am always hungry and wanting to have sex. This is a fact. — Eileen Myles

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

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. — Eileen Myles

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

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. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem. — Eileen Myles

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

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

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

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

The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we're standing, we're doing stand-up. That's exactly what we're doing. — Eileen Myles

I always aimed at being a legend. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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

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. — Eileen Myles

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

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

When somebody's in love with you, they think it's amazing you've written them a poem, and when they don't love you anymore, they hate those poems. They wish those poems would go away. — Eileen Myles

Time passes. That's for sure. — Eileen Myles

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. — Eileen Myles

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

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

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

Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time. — Eileen Myles

Part of the glamour of being a poet was always this long reach into the future. You knew you were managing time. — Eileen Myles

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

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. — Eileen Myles

I hate the word mentor, the professionalization of friendships between generations. I just feel like the fact of friendship is the thing we all adored, like the younger befriends or reaches out to their hero, and for me, whenever you meet some younger person, who has a fire in their gut, a way of being in the world, it excites you. — Eileen Myles

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