Happy Birthday, Eileen Myles, born 9 December 1949.
Quotes
- 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.
- Poetry is my politics. It’s an opportunity that gives me a way to speak.
- 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.
- Time passes. That’s for sure.
- 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 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.
- Women aren’t physically afraid of men; women are genetically afraid of men. It’s happened for such a long time.
- Poetry will always be anti-capitalist because it’s waste, and that’s what we love about it. It’s about looking for things that don’t have to have a direct use. (via)
Eileen Myles is an American poet, novelist, performer, and art journalist. Myles prefers to use gender-neutral pronouns. Their 20 books include Chelsea Girls and Cool For You.
Source for image:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eileen_Myles_at_the_2008_Brooklyn_Book_Festival.jpg
David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Source for quotes: one
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