Eileen Myles Quotes
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A vote should be generative, not like business as usual, which is what voting feels like for most of us.
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As a human being, I'm kind of a cheery melancholic. I have energy; I'm happy.
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I thought 'Chelsea Girls' was going to change my life.
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I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream.
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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.
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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.
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I'm the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years.
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Everybody loved me running for president in '91 and '92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before.
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Older men get lovable, and older women get monstrous.
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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.
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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.
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I'm not against wealth; I just think everybody should have it, same as health.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs: you're their friend.