Eileen Myles Quotes

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Artists like to talk about what they do with people who've read their books, or seen their films.

I try to write art theory down and understand it but I'm not a writer. I don't want to impress people with my writing. I'd rather impress people with my ability to see and feel it and then share that.

By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite.

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none

The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.

I'm especially interested in what I call practitioner criticism, which is when people who practice an art form start writing about it on blogs. I think that's an immensely important development. I want to see much, much more of that. People who make music who are verbally articulate. And not all musicians are verbally articulate. But those who are should be encouraged to write about what they do and their perception of what other people do. It makes the discourse smarter.

We play different people - our art form is performance art - so unless you're playing the same type of person, I don't know if you could improve or make it worse.

Our aim is to take our art to the world and make people understand what it is to move.

Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

I have a suggestion for all of those award seekers and blue ribbon hunters. Spend your efforts on making art that connects with people. Awards impress the grandkids but they don't move the gauge on selling your product. Art needs to touch the emotions of the buyer.

The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art - it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.

What I do as an art form is try to make people feel good and if I do try to make them feel bad, it's for a reason. There's something I am trying to say.

Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.

I write music, and I want people to listen to it and care about it and have it make some difference in their lives. When I'm fortunate for that to happen, then of course I feel very, very good about it.

It would positively be a relief to me to dig Shakespeare up and throw stones at him.

The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside

Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

What's great about art is that if you can reach people, if they hear or see what you do and it moves them, there's a commonality.

In Germany, a certain artistic sense is fairly common, but the artist's sense is foreign there.

If you're wandering the streets, talking in gibberish, nobody ever asks you to change anything about your art because there's no context for people to look at what you do.

I don't ever try to anticipate my audience. I just write the songs I want to write, and hope people like 'em.