I mean, Miles, the line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary

artistic history.

Eileen Miles grew up in Boston, Cambridge, and moved to New York in 1974 to become a poet.

And you did.

Twenty volumes later, you're very nearly the New York port with a branch office in

Harvard, Texas, and still a strong Boston accent that is part of the poems and a fascinating

relationship back and forth.

Do you want to explain it?

You and New York, New York and you, Jack Spicer says, poetry hates Boston.

And you had your own dose of it in your non-Elogy to Robert Law.

How's it going?

I think in Boston, I speak in Boston, I write in Boston, but I live in New York.

And when I was living in Boston, friends of mine, because I came from a working class

background, wanted to suppress the Boston accent, so as to be welcomed into the larger culture

or the other culture and so on.

But when I got to New York in the 70s, I was well aware that the cool people like Bruce

Springsteen and Patty Smith were flaunting their ethnic roots.

And mine happened to be Boston.

So I never got rid of the Boston accent, though it got rid of me largely, but it remains

on certain words and syllables.

And when I go into a reading, it's there as kind of a wawa pedal.

I think it is part of the sound I read John Wieners, and I know how to read him because

...