A biography for Eileen Myleshasn’t been written yet.
“Everybody loved me running for president in '91 and '92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before.”
“I'd like to sit down with Hillary Clinton onstage and ask her about Glass Steagall and all the big banks and her own campaign contributions.”
“I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream.”
“A vote should be generative, not like business as usual, which is what voting feels like for most of us.”
“The first time I voted, I voted for Eugene McCarthy and I knew he wouldn't win, but it felt so great to vote for him, to vote for the right guy - the one who wanted peace.”
“Lyndon Johnson, I know for a fact, was a great president. And I don't mean by that he was a great man.”
“Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.”
“When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness, and that's the birth of the poem.”
“I always aimed at being a legend.”
“I'm the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years.”
“I've grown to love Barack Obama. Hillary is no Bernie Sanders. But she's a politician, and she understands Congress. And I think with that kind of twisted beauty, she could lead our country.”
“Somehow, the whole idea of me writing art reviews was just too much of a complicated thought, but I liked art, and later on I just realized that it would be perhaps a pleasure, and so I decided to do it for 'Art in America' - a lot.”
“I didn't know how to write a novel, so I sort of let it happen in waves. The only way I could write it was to think like scenes in a movie.”
“I was like the family clown. The middle child entertaining. I was a lousy student, but interestingly, the nuns always let me write plays or do drawings, endless special projects.”
“Having big audiences when you're on a book tour is like Valhalla if you're a person who used to sell Girl Scout cookies on the side. Because you want to give the reading that will sell the most books.”
“Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us.”
“I wake up with a sense of wonder. I don't dread the future. I like it.”
“If the poetry world celebrate its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.”
“It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem.”
“Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved.”