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" I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will. "
Eileen Myles
Myself
Loved
Act
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" With Instagram, you're captioning a moment. Twitter is the caption without the image. Even if it's there, the words come first. "
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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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" It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem. "
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" Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You're always home. "
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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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Loved
Running
President
" 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. "
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" Evolution is not an even process. There are surges, and there are micromoments. Certainly a career as an artist is that way. "
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Artist
Career
Evolution
" I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor. "
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Proud
Never
Being
" The poet is like the earth's shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down. "
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Shadow
Sun
Poet
" Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time. "
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Poem
Love
Time
" I'm the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years. "
Eileen Myles
World
Who
Her
" 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
Birth
Writing
Feel
" 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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Perfect
Poetry
Live
" I'm not against wealth; I just think everybody should have it, same as health. "
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Same
Against
Health
" As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary. "
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Because
Things
Poetry
" 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
Poetry
Feelings
Love
" When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are. "
Eileen Myles
Who
Relationships
Up
" 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
Animal
You
Time
" Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy. "
Eileen Myles
Poetry
Key
Democracy
" 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
Peace
Win
Vote
" 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
Way
Happen
Know
" A vote should be generative, not like business as usual, which is what voting feels like for most of us. "
Eileen Myles
Like
Most
Us
" 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
Poetry
People
Look
" I always aimed at being a legend. "
Eileen Myles
Being
Always
Legend
" 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
School
Bad
Writing
" 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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Writing
Way
Style
" 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
Great
Mean
Know
" 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. "
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Child
Special
Family
" 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. "
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Stars
Wind
Celebrate
" 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
Writing
More
Good