Sorry, Tree

I've been a fan of Eileen Myles for decades since I first saw her give a reading, with Michael Lally and Tim Dlugos so you know it's got to have been a long time ago. She would tip her hat to people like John Wieners and James Schuyler but she was always herself, people dubbed her the female this or that (like "the female Ted Berrigan") but that wasn't what she was about. Everytime she was pegged she shrugged her shoulders like Samson and brought down the pegs and the ropes around her, and the roofs and the ceilings of the master's stone buildings. Her line could sometimes be "Schuyler-esque" (and in the new book there's even a Schuyleresque *title,* "April 7) but in the long body of history, I think, Schuyler will be seen to have forecast Myles, rather than have influenced her, because you can forecast the weather but how are you going to influence it--except with the evil global warming of which Jimmy S would have been incapable even in metaphor. "A book is/ a web I suppose," writes Myles, in "Fifty-Three," but this isn't going to be one of those dreary poems about, what is a book? "A book is/ a web I suppose/ saying you come/ here to go/ out an/ incessant/ trembling bridge/ which a tree/ is/ I imagine." At first I thought the book, with that title, SORRY, TREE, was going be a wry apology for cutting down the tree to make the pulp onto which the book is spread, like jam. But hurray, that's not what the title is alluding to! (I read this part, with the lyrics of that Serge Gainsbourg tune skipping through my brain: "Sorry angel/ Sorry so.") Myles has often included, in her books of "poetry," some sort of prose essay, or manifesto, around which the poems accrete and gain meaning; maybe these prose pieces are also there to detourne the shape of the book, to make it not all poetry, for Myles is a well known despiser of genre's segregations. In SORRY, TREE we get "Everyday Barf," which starts out as a simple tale of seasickness on a ferry to Provincetown, and becomes, very quickly, an analysis of everything right and wrong in our world, and everything true and false about the individual in it. I heard Myles read "Everyday Barf" in a darkened performance hall in Los Angeles in the Gehry designed Disney Concert Hall three years back, at the "Seance" conference organized by CalArts. It was a day of extraordinary papers, from everyone from Shelley Jackson to Dennis Cooper to Madeline Gins, but this was the most exhilarating, a ship in a bottle she sent flying through wet and salty air--and we were in it like little people. Like the tiny leaves on the trees here in California. Last time around she published SKIES, which deliberately limited its subject matter, like an Oulipo constraint, and found variety everywhere, but it wasn't my favorite by her. I almost said that SORRY, TREE is what I like, except its newness is still bewildering. In publishing SORRY, TREE Wave Books has upped the ante on themselves, for in one move, releasing a new