Eileen Myles quotes:

I'm a poet born in the era of Andy Warhol and a generation that wanted to be famous.

Listen, I have been educated. I have learned about Western Civilization. Do you know What the message of Western Civilization is? I am alone.

When people decide to talk publicly about poetry as an art form and how it's received, they often get very abject about it: "Nobody reads poetry," and then a thousand people write back, "No, we read poetry." There's an abundance of this negative preaching to the choir, and it's very similar to the experience I'm having.

I think poets are supposed to be writing for television and film. I grew up in the day of early TV that was so raw and funny, and I think we're in the next important moment of television, where it's really telling the epic of the culture like Charles Dickens was doing in the 19th century with his serialized novels.

Time passes. That's for sure.

Part of the glamour of being a poet was always this long reach into the future. You knew you were managing time.

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.

Urban nature is like living with mass conditions. It sometimes feels like a myth & you are its scribe.

Poetry is my politics. It's an opportunity that gives me a way to speak.

People love discovering you. The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs, you're their friend.

People loved to talk about how Frank O'Hara didn't really care about getting published. That doesn't jibe with my experience.

The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous.

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.

Art feels like it has this frame, and it's either outside or inside.

I hate the word mentor, the professionalization of friendships between generations. I just feel like the fact of friendship is the thing we all adored, like the younger befriends or reaches out to their hero, and for me, whenever you meet some younger person, who has a fire in their gut, a way of being in the world, it excites you.

I am always hungry and wanting to have sex. This is a fact.

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.

Women aren't physically afraid of men; women are genetically afraid of men. It's happened for such a long time.

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.

I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live.