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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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