Eileen Myles’s writing is nimble yet incisive, insouciant yet wise. The author of no fewer than twenty-three books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, Myles makes the act of writing seem both impossibly cool and effortlessly deep. Monumental and natural and the smallest, simplest, most meaningful thing. Both pathetic and of course not at all so. They fill the act of writing and being a writer with possibility and agency. For years now, at the end of every semester, I have sent students at Columbia University and elsewhere off into the world with Myles’s valedictory words: “I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life—not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.” Generally, this is followed by claps and, at times, tears.

Myles’s role as sage advice giver—as a commencer into what we might call, taking their cue, “a ‘Working Life’”—feels apt. (As they wrote to me recently: “Let me be the one to convince nonfiction students that poetry is nonfiction just like everything else.”) I first met Eileen in 2012 or 2013 at the former Center for Fiction space in Midtown Manhattan. I remember they were warm and unexpectedly practical: we quickly got to talking about our dogs, and Eileen suggested I find a good dog sitter, if I didn’t know one already—as a writer, you need to be able to travel and do residencies, and so you need someone you can trust to care for your animal companion. I must have been twenty-nine or thirty at the time, still very much finding my way, but I felt there was something unusually gracious about Eileen’s gesture of treating the greenhorn as a fellow traveler, despite his age and what must have been obvious inexperience. I found it ennobling.