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.
Eileen MylesI 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.
Eileen MylesAs a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carrโs hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author speakโa whispering that enables us into its world . . . a masterfully sutured journey, painfully useful. SarahโOf Fragments and Lines is a book I know I will return to. And urge it on my friends who have lives too and write in them.
Eileen MylesWhen 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.
Eileen Myles