Eileen Myles Quotes

I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.

With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

I'm about 75 pages into a book on poetry. I don't know if anybody wants to read it. It's on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, 'Okay, that's another one.' They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable.

Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.

My mind is stuffed with quotes. Lines, couplets, paragraphs, stanzas; Bessie Smith, Stevie Smith, Tin Pan Alley, rock and roll. They tease or lead or hurl me into a dream space of jostling languages that I need to bask in each day in order to write.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.

I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

I wish I could write lyrical poems, but I just write the way they come.