Top 74 Eileen Myles Quotes
#1. Evolution is not an even process. There are surges, and there are micromoments. Certainly a career as an artist is that way.
Eileen Myles
#2. 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
#3. It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem.
Eileen Myles
#4. 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
#5. Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
Eileen Myles
#6. Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy.
Eileen Myles
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. I wake up with a sense of wonder. I don't dread the future. I like it.
Eileen Myles
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#15. Everybody loved me running for president in '91 and '92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before.
Eileen Myles
#16. I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream.
Eileen Myles
#17. I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
Eileen Myles
#18. Poetry is my politics. It's an opportunity that gives me a way to speak.
Eileen Myles
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary.
Eileen Myles
#24. I am always hungry and wanting to have sex. This is a fact.
Eileen Myles
#25. Already I know it will hurt this is the hurt country
Eileen Myles
#26. The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.
Eileen Myles
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Women aren't physically afraid of men; women are genetically afraid of men. It's happened for such a long time.
Eileen Myles
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. I've had a lifelong waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling when something good happens.
Eileen Myles
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. A vote should be generative, not like business as usual, which is what voting feels like for most of us.
Eileen Myles
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. I'm not against wealth; I just think everybody should have it, same as health.
Eileen Myles
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Urban nature is like living with mass conditions. It sometimes feels like a myth & you are its scribe.
Eileen Myles
#46. 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
#47. I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor.
Eileen Myles
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. I'm a poet born in the era of Andy Warhol and a generation that wanted to be famous.
Eileen Myles
#51. 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
#52. I thought 'Chelsea Girls' was going to change my life.
Eileen Myles
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. And how are your teeth tonight?
Can you afford to fix them?
Eileen Myles
#58. If there is something I will always carry in my heart it is this earnest unwillingness to be part of the bunch,
Eileen Myles
#59. The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs: you're their friend.
Eileen Myles
#61. 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
#62. I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will.
Eileen Myles
#63. I'm the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years.
Eileen Myles
#64. Part of the glamour of being a poet was always this long reach into the future. You knew you were managing time.
Eileen Myles
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are.
Eileen Myles
#68. As a human being, I'm kind of a cheery melancholic. I have energy; I'm happy.
Eileen Myles
#69. The poet is like the earth's shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down.
Eileen Myles
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Older men get lovable, and older women get monstrous.
Eileen Myles
#73. Who doesn't want to be famous? I am famous. I'm dying to be on TV.
Eileen Myles
#74. 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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