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

Time passes. That's for sure.

I 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.

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.

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.

Part of the glamour of being a poet was always this long reach into the future. You knew you were managing time.

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