Eileen Myles Quotes

Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry.

Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets' being second-rate.

I write a lot of songs people don't hear. I really just enjoy the process. I finish 'em all. I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between the bad ones and the good ones.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd

Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

Failure's inevitable. It happens all the time in a complex economy. And how did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us, computers and cell phones and so on? Well, the process was trial and error. There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered, and the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

It's really easy, once somebody passes away, for the tales about them to become taller, the good ones and the bad ones.

If there used to be 100 people at a major working on a record, now there are 18, but they're the good ones. There's a lean, mean hunger.

Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

People inspire me to write, the good ones and the bad ones.

My worst job ever, this was when I was a kid, was picking potatoes on the back of a trailer in March. It was freezing, absolutely freezing. We had to sort the good ones from the bad ones. Once you do that for a day in March in the north of England, it makes you think there must be better jobs than this!

I come from a family of teachers, and I believe ideas matter; the good ones deserve reverence, and the bad ones, defiance.

I'm a big action junkie. I grew up on the '80s action movies - the bad ones and the good ones.

While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

How did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us - computers and cell phones and so on? There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered. And the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.