When I taught at the University of California San Diego, I taught a class called Distributing Literature. I made it into a real workshop—people in the class were asked to invent a new method for getting poetry into the world. Two women in the class took a terrific short lyric poem by Michael McClure. They put the words on refrigerator magnets, and they had a kind of flat palette, and they went around the campus and found people who worked on the campus, in janitorial, in the cafeteria, in tech, everybody other than students and teachers. They said, Would you make a poem out of these words? What they showed was that one perfect little poem contains so many other variations. I found it an unforgettable realization that nothing ever really lands, nothing is ever really fixed. It’s kind of a beautiful accident each time. I feel like that’s the business I’m in, and that’s what excites me about poetry. SRC: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/09/05/trump-is-a-performance-artist-an-interview-with-eileen-myles/
