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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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