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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. "

Eileen Myles

Family

Children

Smart

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" Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time. "

" 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. "

" I always aimed at being a legend. "

" 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. "

" A vote should be generative, not like business as usual, which is what voting feels like for most of us. "

Eileen Myles

Most

" 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. "

" I thought 'Chelsea Girls' was going to change my life. "

" Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy. "

" 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. "

" Lyndon Johnson, I know for a fact, was a great president. And I don't mean by that he was a great man. "

" 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

Job

Care

" 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. "

" I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time. "

" 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. "

" I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will. "

" 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. "

" 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

Good

" Everybody loved me running for president in '91 and '92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before. "

" 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. "

" I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose. "

" I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream. "

" 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. "

" As a human being, I'm kind of a cheery melancholic. I have energy; I'm happy. "

" 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. "

" Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You're always home. "

" 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. "