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
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
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
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
The poet is like the earth’s shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down. – 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
I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will. – 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
Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the 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
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 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 thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you’re theirs: you’re their friend. – 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 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
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
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
Everybody loved me running for president in ’91 and ’92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before. – 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
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’ve had a lifelong waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling when something good happens. – Eileen Myles
