If you’ve been meaning to get to the Russell House Series all semester but never got around to it, you’ve officially missed your chance: the final reading took place on Wednesday, April 24. Poet Eileen Myles gave a lengthy reading that surveyed much of her recent work before taking questions from students.

Myles published her first volume of poetry, “The Irony of the Leash,” in 1978. Since then, she has run a write-in campaign for herself during the 1992 presidential election, directed the University of California, San Diego’s writing program, taught at a number of other universities, and grown into one of the most celebrated and prolific poets of the Internet age. She was the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship; perhaps of equal importance, there exists a “Fuck Yeah Eileen Myles” Tumblr.

Visiting Writer in English Dorothea Lasky introduced the poet with glowing opening remarks, recounting the time she heard Myles read at an MFA program that required her to attend a series of lectures much like Wesleyan’s.

“Eileen Myles’ reading was the first one that meant anything to me, where I felt, ‘Hey, here I am; I am home,’” Lasky said. “Myles’ work is home to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. For me, what welcomed me first was the way she elegantly mimics speech patterns, broke up her lines to make a cut into the way emotional logic really works. There’s no one who does this better than her, anywhere, at any point in history.”

After the introduction, Myles took the podium. At points throughout the night’s reading, she appeared a bit nervous, remarking, “it’s wicked quiet,” after reading the first poem of the night. Myles’ poetry is fast, colloquial, and often quite funny, so she may have mistaken the room’s silent, rapt attention for boredom. Yet while she might have appeared anxious when she was addressing the crowd, stage fright was nowhere to be found in her dynamic and precise readings of her work.

Myles began with a selection of new poems that ranged from “William Dawes,” inspired by the recent Boston Marathon bombings, to funnier shorts like “Tree”:

“You have a purpose, which is your existence. I love you. It’s so intense. It’s oaky.”

After that, she read a passage from her 2010 novel “Inferno,” which tracks the life of a poet named Eileen. She then read some selections from “Snowflake/different streets,” her most recent volume of poetry released last year, before closing with a passage from “Afterglow,” her upcoming memoir. Last year’s Guggenheim award went toward the completion of this work.

These pieces of Myles’ writing took up the vast majority of her talk, but she never once seemed like she was running out of steam in her energetic delivery. She did have time to take some questions at the end regarding her recent and upcoming work. One person asked about her relationship to her fictionalized alter ego in “Inferno.”

“Once you write something, you actually aren’t the person who wrote it anymore,” Myles responded. “I feel like the writing is always sort of a little behind you and a little ahead of you, and it winds up being kind of a relic of a moment. I create this character Eileen, which is a lot of me, but I get to make her be smarter and funnier and stupider and meaner. There are all these excesses and pulling backs, [to the point that] I’m using something like silly putty…I feel like the self in the writing is a loose container that is named Eileen.”