I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope thereโs mystery and poetry in your life โ not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.
Eileen MylesI 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 MylesPeople love discovering you. The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs, you're their friend.
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