Eileen Myles Quotes

Listen, I have been educated. I have learned about Western Civilization. Do you know What the message of Western Civilization is? I am alone.

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

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. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other’s hearts. I guess there’s other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You’re always home.

If passion was a substance I would say it is dark brown, and then blood red. It's like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It's warm and it stinks like shit and it's unaccountably and endlessly good. It's thick and it goes on for miles and it isn't so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. That's all you know.

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.

If the end of one's youth is a thin slice of cheese I ate mine standing in that room. I was there because I was hungry. That's all.

Time passes. That's for sure.

If there is something I will always carry in my heart it is this earnest unwillingness to be part of the bunch,

I hope you all find yourself 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 there's mystery and poetry in your life, 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.

The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous.

All the details of my life were in exact order and yet I was tumbling in them-out of order like a tremendous wave had hit me and I was thrown off the ship and I awoke or dreaming, or dead I knew not-no I couldn't speak.

I have waited all my life for permission. I feel it growing in my breast. A war is storming and it is behind me and I am moving my forces into light.

But if I paid attention, really paid attention maybe I could ignore the mountain of sadness and she might entertain and distract me and I would think this is life. The romance and the sadness. I am in it now. I did do that which is what happened.

And how are your teeth tonight? Can you afford to fix them?

(Interviews Ntozake Shange) “What do you think an artist’s job is?” “To keep our sensibilities alive, so we aren’t numb by our struggles to survive. That’s what I think our job is right now.

I still feel like the world is a piece of bread, I’m holding out half to you

In the month of December I couldn’t get out of bed. I kept waking up at 6 P.M. and it was Christmas or New Year’s and I had to start drinking & eating.

Nope, I am destroyed. A shattered boat of a person. A broken window here, a lousy bell there. An old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking into a book. A drippy excrescence. A schmear.

What happened was private. I was in it with Rose. She had hurt me grievously and now I was forever attached. I was in it now with all the women in the world. I walked home glad. I will die, I thought with a bounce in my step. I'm whole. Not whole like anyone else, but whole like me. Painful, but simple. It was very simple now.

You know how you’re always half hungry while in bed. Well this was like sleeping with a meal, a big fried meal, you have your arms around it.

You can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told.

already I know it will hurt this is the hurt country

The best thing you can do for a writer is give them a bad review.

If boys were always trying to get in girls’ pants, what did they want? What could the girls give them? Pee it seemed to me was an appropriate gift.

The poet’s life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and days whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window. We’re hunched and weaving over the keys of our green our grey or pink blue manual typewriter maybe a darker stone cold thoritative selectric with its orgasmic expectant hum and us popping pills and laughing over what you or I just wrote, wondering if that line means insult or sex. Or both. Usually both.

What I started to understand was that the poem was made out of time–past, present and future. It lives in the present, it breathes there and that’s how you let anyone in. I think people can feel this accessing of time in poetry very readily. As soon as the poem ceases to be about anything, when it even stops saving things, stops being such a damn collector, it becomes an invite to the only refuge which is the impossible moment of being alive.

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.

…the world doesn’t exist to amplify or exemplify our own preexisting tastes, values, or predilections. It simply exists. We don’t have to like all of it, or remain mute in the face of our discontent. But there’s a difference between going to art with the hope that it will reify a belief or value we already hold, and feeling angry or punitive when it doesn’t, and going to art to see what it’s doing, what’s going on, treating it as a place to get “the real and irregular news of how others around [us] think and feel,” as Eileen Myles once put it.

I wish I could remember how the days went. I feel like I'm looking through a window at my own past, and if I could just trace it with my fingertips or my breath on it I could see where I've been.

I awoke from this nightmare into a freezing cold motel room: the heater had broken at some point during the night, and the fan was now blowing icy air into the room. At first I tried to keep warm under the crappy motel bedspread by thinking about the man I loved. At the time he was traveling in Europe, and was thus unreachable. I didn't know it yet, but as I lay there, he was traveling with another woman. Does it matter now? I tried hard to feel his body wrapped tightly around mine. Next I tried to imagine everyone I had ever loved, and everyone who had ever loved me, wrapped around me. I tried to feel that I was the composite of all these people, instead of alone in a shitty motel room with a broken heater somewhere outside of Detroit, a few miles from where Jane's body was dumped thirty-six years ago on a March night just like this one. 'Need each other as much as you can bear,' writes Eileen Myles. 'Everywhere you go in the world.' I felt the wild need for any or all of these people that night. Lying there alone, I began to feel - perhaps even to know - that I did not exist apart from their love and need of me. Of this latter I felt less sure, but it seemed possible, if the equation worked both ways. Falling asleep I thought, 'Maybe this, for me, is the hand of God.

Because rich people need poor friends (but not too poor!) to maintain their connection to the struggle that spawned them even if they never struggled. Poor people tend to know what's going on plus they are often good-looking, at least when they are young and even later they are the cool interesting people the rich person once slept with, so the poor person always feathers the nests of the rich.

The room was the poem, the day I was in. Oh Christ. What writes my poem is the second ring, inner or outer. Poetry is just the performance of it. These little things, whether I write them or not. That's the score. The thing of great value is you. Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live.

Allen Ginsberg asked me to sign his book. I must've stood there for five minutes drawing a complete blank. Hi Allen, from one howl to another. Dear Allen I'm glad you think I'm a poet. Love, Eileen. I'm the only woman you like, right Allen? Only the craziest thoughts passed through my mind. Finally he started getting embarrassed. Just sign it. Come by and write something better when you think of it. I scrawled something. I forget what it was.

For some reason I just want to mention another German artist I like a lot. Imi Knoebel. He once described hiding in an attic during the bombing of Dresden and how the flashes of bombs filled a triangular shaped window in the room he was in and the experience contributed to his love of simple shapes. Is that love or merely imprinting. It was simple and strong and one is forced in a way to see the world the way it IS shaped. Art becomes a momory more than anything else. A kind of chooser. It shows how we were touched.

Lucifer's name means light and the reason they threw him out of heaven and he became the biggest devil and not the biggest saint anymore was what he did with language.

I think being with a person is better than caring about them. I cared about them. I cared about them more than their relatives did, and I didn't care about them at all.

You can't force a story that doesn't want to be told. It was that kind of year.

Everything I did was something to fix me. With all my heart I was trying to be dead.

Awards are the only currency Amercian writing has to describe a writer’s work.

I come and go. An edible saint. But if you feast on me you will be hungry.

Watching the fragments float by for years.

What is it about the January feeling— past everything else, low-glowing hunger that propels me around

I write because I would like to be used for years after my death.

catholic poets only pray, no matter what they say

For all these reasons (...) working class intellectuals like big words and their sentence formation is excessively ornate. It's what they think of as 'smart'. Pomposity. It's an embarrassing condition of being unsophisticated and not knowing what is truly smart which is simplicity and modernism; certainly it was twenty years ago that I learned to write. But the working class person is above all afraid to seem dumb so in acting 'smart' and footnoting everything they betray the insecurity and weightiness of the unexperienced conclusion, which is an imitation of what writers are like. In general I think writers are not smart. They are something else and each writer can fill in a word here, but smart is not what that word is.

In grade school we were cautioned if we couldn't draw faces we could just leave them orange. Sometimes I am flying by so fast and the people are faceless like dying stars and I am so alone.

The secret of the world, the inside of it – I had evidence now – was undeniably lesbian. And every woman I knew wanted to be one. And I wanted Rose. Day in and day out. My wanting her was my wanting to be alive.

I stopped typing and started having a conversation about the blog post with my boyfriend. He said he’d liked the part where the narrator had explained that, while she was disturbed by the revelation that the Internet writer had a girlfriend – because that meant he wasn’t the pure ethical person she’d perceived him to be via reading his literary criticism (which, !) –she was flattered and aroused that he was overcoming his principles in order to be with her. Keith said, “It’s like he can do no wrong. I thought that was nice.” I surprised myself by turning to him and shouting. “It’s a SLAVE MENTALITY. IT’S A SLAVE MENTALITY!!!” I tried to explain what I meant. I talked about how Ellen Willis had a theory that women didn’t know what their true sexuality was like, because they’d been conditioned to develop fantasies that enable them to act in a way that conforms to what men want from them, or what they think men want from them. And I thought about how Eileen Myles described the difference between having sex with men and having sex with women, how having sex with men was more about forcing yourself into what their idea of what sex was supposed to be. I told him that in my experience men do not often become suddenly charmed or intrigued by aspects of women that they have also perceived as off-putting or scary. Men, heterosexual men, don’t tend to make excuses for women and find reasons to admire them despite and even slightly because of their faults, unless their faults are cute little hole-in-the-stocking faults. Whereas women, heterosexual women, are capable of finding being ignored, being alternately worshiped and insulted, not to mention male pattern baldness, not just tolerable but erotic.

Fear of not being understood is the greatest fear I thought lying on the bathroom floor at 11P.M. worse than not pleasing people, worse than anything else I can think of. Worse than being cold or alone. Worse than getting old.

It's like she's pulling Post-it notes out of her hair and lecturing from them, one of my peers once complained about the teaching style of my beloved teacher Mary Ann Caws. ...Ditto Eileen Myles, who tells a great story about a student at UC San Diego once complaining that her lecturing style was like 'throwing a pizza at us.' My feeling is, you should be so lucky to get a pizza in the face from Eileen Myles, or a Post-it note plucked from the nest of Mary Ann Caws's hair.

On The Death of Robert Lowell by Eileen Myles O, I don’t give a shit. He was an old white haired man Insensate beyond belief and Filled with much anxiety about his imagined Pain. Not that I’d know I hate fucking wasps. The guy was a loon. Signed up for Spring Semester at Macleans A really lush retreat among pines and Hippy attendants. Ray Charles also once rested there. So did James Taylor… The famous, as we know, are nuts. Take Robert Lowell. The old white haired coot. Fucking dead.

He had studied philosophy as a young man, but clay really spoke to him. I like mud, he explained. And then he went on to explain the Earth's magnetism, and why clay does stick together and it's about ions and stuff. And there are specific muds, or clays. For instance, this: red. Deep deep beautiful red. Albany slip. I stand there in awe, slipping around in worlds of specialization. The endless details, but the Earth is a big wad of it, mud. And that would be a huge start, to know that you liked it. There it is.

You had a couple of Adidas teeshirts. I don’t get it, I said. You said it’s a joke. You kind of shrugged. “I have this funny kind of sense of humor.” It was the exact same shrug you made a split second before you kissed me on the night we became lovers. Colombo was on teevee and we were sitting on a rolled up exercise mat on the floor. The look on your face, my favorite look was here goes. It looked like the smallest decision, like a boat slightly turning but now absolutely going in that direction. I was fixed.

We're basking in language itself. The silence of my friend. My love. The one beyond words in her silence. She is always eternally before. When she speaks it is shit, a gift, something to do. In our moment, of waiting, pointing, silent gear, what we went out for—that is pointing. Shit is the award. The award is shit.

I’ve often thought of a female Christ. David told me there’s one in a church in Montreal. Mostly the world can’t take it. Because of people’s feelings about the delicacy of women and also because of what a meaningless display female suffering simply is. If you belittle us in school, treat us like slaves at home and finally, if you get a woman alone in bed just tell her she’s all wrong, no matter what sex you are. . . or maybe you just grab one on the street and fuck her real fast—in an alley, or in her own bed. I mean if that’s the way it usually goes for this girl what would be the point in seeing her half nude and nailed up? Where’s the contradiction? Could that drive the culture for 2,000 years? No way. Female suffering must be hidden, or nothing can work. It’s a man’s world and a girl on a cross would be like seeing a dead animal in a trap. We like to eat them, or see them stuffed, we even like to wear them, but watch them suffer? Hear them wail?

For some reason I just want to mention another German artist I like a lot. Imi Knoebel. He once described hiding in an attic during the bombing of Dresden and how the flashes of bombs filled a triangular shaped window in the room he was in and the experience contributed to his love of simple shapes. Is that love or merely imprinting. It was simple and strong and one is forced in a way to see the world the way it IS shaped. Art becomes a memory more than anything else. A kind of chooser. It shows how we were touched.

I see my existence as similar to that of a sundial's when I simply stand, and slowly the notion of movement is suggesting itself to my consciousness and action is also appropriate in the realm of the saint, the character who begins her life in the windows of a church, in the religious air of her own imagination until history lines up with her nature, and the path becomes clear -- the storms of identity erupt and implode and gather again and one of life's soldiers realizes her whole basis for living has changed and now she is impelled forward in a new film.

1990 was a totally political time. George Bush was president, people were dying of AIDS, a lot of our friends, and there was no money being spent by the government either on AIDS or art. So a lot of extreme sexual and political work was made at that time. It was in response to the situation. But that kind of "edgy" political work wasn't exactly what I was doing. I felt a little like my mother. I just wasn't surprised that the government wouldn't support this work. What would you expect. I had personally grown up in a world of total censorship so I wasn't surprised to see politicians wanting to take money away from the art that was explicitly talking about this entire reality of ours. It seemed like the real desire from them (the politicians) was to have no description. That's what they would have paid for. ...Doing their business, wars or whatever, behind the scenes and meanwhile propagating a giant nothing which has become a something the government and the media have only perfected since. To a very large extent people don't even know. I mean it's kind of the great product of this country. The American Way. A big nothing. A cataclysmic unawareness in the face of evil.

The beauty of the story is that it happened. It was the last thing that happened in New York. Everything else happened while I was stopping it from happening.

The State tells the epic of people's lives, putting people on the scale, weighing all the wrong things, then acting ponderous about the misinformation.

Gömleğimi çıkardım ve hiç kimseye dönüştüm, isimsiz, cinsiyetsiz, yalnızca bir arazide bir köpekle etrafta gezinen bir canlı. Bana bunu sanat getirdi.

kalbim ya da daha eski bir yerim iflas edecekti. Işığım.

Later on I published these poems as Sappho’s Boat to make damn sure everyone knew what I meant.

Her face was kind of Chinese. Like Mongolian. She kind of looked like a dog. One of those little dogs. The way all her hair framed her face and her big glasses and that small face reading and then her voice was deep. Like she was used to using it. Not for talking, not for teaching. She intoned. It was like she was a little ugly church. I thought she was ugly. A woman could be such a mess, so dark. But it was great. This is a poet. Her poem was about New York and buildings and just how unhappy she had been there. "Between the lower east side tenements the sky is a snotty handkerchief." The clouds were full of snot. What an idea. A woman who was kind of ugly said that.

I-I can’t find that track. Would you send it to me. Oh I do? I have it? You’re right. It is there. But now I can’t open it. I’m trying.

Or the angry ones. Holding their heads oh no like a virus is taking over. My mind! Like it’s such a big deal. Minds are always being taken over. Succumb, don’t resist. Because we do get to choose what we are succumbing to. We create worlds out of what we put into our heads. I don’t know about you. It’s why I read.

Who doesn’t envy a child’s endless sense of things. Not that they have it but it’s what they feel. It’s what we’re born to know. A sensation of being unhampered by anything except adults.

Finally I sent her a postcard with a dolphin leaping through a flaming hoop on its front. When you wiggled the postcard the dolphin leapt through. I felt that said it all and I had just quit jumping for her.

I would put my head on her shoulder by her neck and smell her. A dusty sweetish smell, very mild, delicate in that it could be distant and yet it was not, it was intimate. It was the closest thing to me in the world. [Camille Roy, "Reading My Catastrophe" (p 71)]

I wonder what anybody thinks about using your own life. The actual words people say to you in the secrecy of love or separation or the oblivious moments when they've simply torn off an insult and flung it at you, and you're the one who remembers every little word, at least the ones I use, and I fling it back in their faces. If not there, then here, sooner or later, and they say, "Oh, I can't believe I said that.

I wonder what anybody thinks about using your own life, the actual words people say to you in the secrecy of love, or separation, or the oblivious moments when they’ve simply torn off an insult and flung it at you and you’re the one who remembers every little word, at least the ones I use and I fling it back in their faces, if not there, then here, sooner or later and they say, “Oh, I can’t believe I said that.

I just need to tell this story for me or else I will burst. It's lonely to be alive and never know the whole story. Everyone must walk with that thought. I would like to tell everything once, just my part, because this is my life, not yours.

I’m from a family of readers. Not of great books, but of great reading

every cow that jumps off the truck can be free will you jump with me

are you writing a book or are you just in your house

It's so easy to give up - to live in dreams with yourself instead of in stories with a friend. I distrust dreams. it's just your brain re-stirring information uselessly, fending for itself in another dimension, making movies of its own fears and you wake up horrified or calmed by something that never happened or dissatisfied and you go back down for more which is all you get. Dreaming is like getting drunk alone, the less you live the more you dream, the more fantastic and outrageous the dreams get. I bet that's all dead people do, dream endlessly, and dreams are death in training.

It’s so easy to give up – to live in dreams with yourself instead of in stories with a friend. I distrust dreams. It’s just your brain re-stirring information uselessly, fending for itself in another dimension, making movies of its own fears and you wake up horrified or calmed by something that never happened or dissatisfied and you go back down for more which is all you get. Dreaming is like getting drunk alone, the less you live the more you dream, the more fantastic and outrageous the dreams get. I bet that’s all dead people do, dream endlessly, and dreams are death in training.

cunt. I read once that the most powerful kind of reinforcement is occasional. It was in fact a dog-training book and it’s the closest thing to the truth I know. It’s the law. If you want your dog to act like a beggar, feed her from the table once in a while. Feed her maybe the day you bring her home and not again until she is ten and then twice a week.

It seemed like people then had a lot of feelings and you could get all bundled up like Eli had and brood with them for a while, or you could recoil entirely like I was doing (for professional reasons) and consider your behavior just art, grist for the mill.

why shouldn’t something I have always known be the very best there is.