I don’t remember a time before Eileen Myles, though surely there was one. I have three copies of Inferno; I don’t remember why, and I can’t bring myself to give away even one.

I listen to Myles’s "An American Poem" via Andrea Kirsch’s film version a lot. Probably a weird number of times. 

For the uninitiated, here’s the spine of the poem:

But I am no longer
        ashamed, no longer
        alone. I am not
        alone tonight because
        we are all Kennedys.
        And I am your President.

I send it to people whenever I need to remind them that they, too, are Kennedys.

On the page, it’s perfect. In Myles’s mouth, it becomes something else entirely, half incantation, half late-night phone call.

Myles was one of the first people I looked at and thought: yes, that one. Perfect.

As a kid, my favorite person in the world, my aunt Prilly, lived in Boston, and nothing felt more magical than her apartment near Harvard Square, the city noise outside her window, the blended vowels of her friends. Yes, because of that. Yes, because of the tiny gap between Myles’s front teeth. Because of the technicolor lighting and gray New York backdrop of the 1980s music videos and movies that raised me.

“An American Poem” is timeless, like Howl without the superiority complex and the NAMBLA ties.

By the time Lighthouse put Eileen Myles on the 2025 Lit Fest program, they were already part of the vernacular of my inner life. You’d think I would apply for their advanced workshop; this was my poet, my president, after all.

I didn’t even consider it.

What if they were an asshole? What if they chewed weirdly or made tacky little smacking sounds with their mouth between sentences? What if their hands were strange in some unnameable way, and once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it? I don’t have language for the fear, just this: losing Eileen Myles was not a risk I could afford.

My idols are mostly writers, sometimes obscure ones at that, and so far, very few of them have actually turned out to be assholes.

I took a workshop with Hanif Abdurraqib once and was so nervous I could barely read my overwrought poem about a sex worker falling asleep in a diner booth (spoiler: it was me). Hanif, for the record, has incredible hands. Perfect hands. My idols have mostly been kind, or at least human in a bearable way. But Eileen? I loved them too much. I couldn’t risk shrinking them down to the scale of just another disappointing person with a bad smell and noticeably new shoes.

So I took the two-hour craft seminar instead.

I went, by coincidence, with one of my Book Project cohort, the one who is somehow both the most and least like me at the same time. I felt a little embarrassed to be that close to Eileen in front of someone who actually knows me—knows I’m crass, knows from my own writing that I fall in love like a John Hughes protagonist: kind of cute on the surface, weird and deeply disturbing if you look too close. It’s not healthy.

Something about photographs and a dog. Lit Fest is such a luxurious Dionysian feast for word-weirdos that it’s easy to blur it into one streak of memory-color. I don’t remember the details of the class. It was generative. I have no idea what I wrote or where those pages went. I don’t remember the prompt.

I remember Myles showing us pictures of their apartment, the way they talked about space and objects without fuss. Maybe I wrote about a recently dead client. He was on my mind a lot around that time. Eileen kneeled on one knee, washboard-worn jeans cuffed—their signature cuffed jeans. It seems unlikely that they had a white daisy in their hair, but in my memory, it’s there. They sat like the thinker, elbow on knee, listening with absolute attunement to someone reading. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about who it was or what they were reading, but Myles was fucking hearing it.

I remember the feeling of being in the same room as the voice that had been in my head for years, and realizing that nothing about them broke the spell.

Myles occupies a specific cultural stratum: wildly famous in certain queer, literary, filthy-but-high-art circles and barely known outside them. They’re like John Waters that way. They’re hardly at the center of the American mental hearth, I know, but if you’re in the orbit, it’s part of your wiring. You think in its images and sound cues. You reference it without meaning to. It’s almost impossible to explain anything important about your interior life without it.

Myles is like that for me. If you know, you know. And if you don’t, I start proselytizing.

For years, that proselytizing just ran in the background: emails to far-flung friends, Inferno quoted in workshop margins, the Andrea Kirsch film slipped into people’s queues like a dare. Lit Fest only concentrated it. By closing night, most of the writers I love and respect at Lighthouse at least knew Myles’s name; some already carried the work around in their heads; a few were as feral for them as I was. Others were walking into a crowded room basically untouched, weary from the too much socializing.

Lighthouse was packed: my Book Project cohort, faculty I revere, people I’ve worshipped from a distance, and people I drink coffee with in real life. Some of my favorite humans on the planet in one room. I watched them settle in with their plastic cups of wine, small talk, and looking at watches, wondering if they should have just headed out after the last workshop.

But then, they got Eileen.

Eileen Myles read the way they always have: loose and precise at once, half stand-up, half confession, the kind of performance that rearranges the molecules of a room. The air changed. People leaned forward. They laughed where I knew they would laugh, and went quiet where I knew they’d go quiet. I felt like I’d smuggled contraband into the building and was watching it bloom across the faces of people I loved.

Myles was the star of the night. Easily. No contest. And somehow, in that dim June room, it felt almost indecently intimate. Because they weren’t just a poet. They were my poet. My long-term parasocial crush; my internal narrator. The voice I’d carried around for years, the poet I’d shoved on everyone like a mixtape.

Never mind that there’s no such thing as just a poet, just a writer anyway. I saw the biopic about the last year of Andrea Gibson’s life, about what it means to live and die and find your soulmate. Gibson, the first person to encourage me to get on stage a million years ago at a slam. Gibson, the first non-boy I ever tried, and failed, to bring home from a reading. In the film, they talk about their wife, poet Megan Falley, having to tell them about the cancer the surgeon found while they were still surfacing from anesthesia. I can’t find the exact line, but it was something like: people think being a poet is wildly impractical right up until you have to tell someone you love really bad news.

That’s what we do a lot of the time, as writers and poets: find a way to tell what we love, the really bad news. And all those impracticalities are worth it, just to be less alone in a room for even a moment.

Sitting there—surrounded by the writers who make up my weird little life, watching them fall under the same spell—I realized something I’d been resisting: sometimes you should meet your idols. Not to take a selfie. Not to collect them like trophies. But to watch the thing that saved you a little bit go to work on other people. To see it land. To feel, for one minute, like the secret language that built your interior world is suddenly shared.

We walked out into the Denver night afterward, high on it, talking too fast. People who had never read Myles before were already pulling out their phones to order books, sending each other links, repeating lines. It felt like being in that inner ring together, an initiated little John Waters–Myles–Lighthouse Venn diagram.

They were never really “mine,” of course. But that night, it felt close. Close enough that I could finally admit what had kept me from that advanced workshop in the first place: not just fear they’d be awful, but the deeper terror that they’d be ordinary. That the magic would thin out under fluorescent classroom lights.

Instead, they walked onstage and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that magic is real. That it had always been them. That sometimes the people who live in your head are just as strange and generous and precise in real life.

So, go. Please, while you still can. Meet your idols, then. Not all of them. Not recklessly. But when it’s your poet, and they’re already in the room, reading to your people under the same dim lights? Stay. Listen. Let them be the star. Let yourself be one in a roomful of Kennedys, rejecting the message that you are alone.

Eileen Myles

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