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I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
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
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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 -
I always aimed at being a legend.
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 -
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.
Eileen Myles -
Older men get lovable, and older women get monstrous.
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
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Everybody loved me running for president in '91 and '92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before.
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 not against wealth; I just think everybody should have it, same as health.
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 tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream.
Eileen Myles -
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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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 -
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 -
The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs: you're their friend.
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 -
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 -
I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor.
Eileen Myles
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I thought 'Chelsea Girls' was going to change my life.
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 -
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'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