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.

People love discovering you. The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs, you're their friend.

As a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carr’s hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author speak—a whispering that enables us into its world . . . a masterfully sutured journey, painfully useful. Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines is a book I know I will return to. And urge it on my friends who have lives too and write in them.

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

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 hate the word mentor, the professionalization of friendships between generations. I just feel like the fact of friendship is the thing we all adored, like the younger befriends or reaches out to their hero, and for me, whenever you meet some younger person, who has a fire in their gut, a way of being in the world, it excites you.

I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live.

The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we're standing, we're doing stand-up. That's exactly what we're doing.

Poetry is my politics. It's an opportunity that gives me a way to speak.

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

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

Time passes. That's for sure.

Art feels like it has this frame, and it's either outside or inside.

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.

When people decide to talk publicly about poetry as an art form and how it's received, they often get very abject about it: Nobody reads poetry, and then a thousand people write back, No, we read poetry. There's an abundance of this negative preaching to the choir, and it's very similar to the experience I'm having.