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I've had a lifelong waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling when something good happens.
Eileen Myles
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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
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Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You're always home.
Eileen Myles
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Evolution is not an even process. There are surges, and there are micromoments. Certainly a career as an artist is that way.
Eileen Myles
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will.
Eileen Myles
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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
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When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are.
Eileen Myles
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The poet is like the earth's shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down.
Eileen Myles
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The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.
Eileen Myles
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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
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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
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I always aimed at being a legend.
Eileen Myles
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It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem.
Eileen Myles
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Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
Eileen Myles
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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
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I'm the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years.
Eileen Myles
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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
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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
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Everybody loved me running for president in '91 and '92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before.
Eileen Myles
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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
