Eileen Myles. Sorry, Tree. Wave Books, 2007.

Review by Gina Myers

Written to present at a panel on the poetry of everyday, Eileen Myles’ “Everyday Barf,” opens with the statement: “I don’t mind today, but the everyday makes me barf. There’s no such thing.” And so it goes with Myles’ poetry—there is not an interest in the everyday, but an interest in celebrating each individual day, an awareness of being there/here in the present. In her latest collection, Sorry, Tree (which includes the piece “Everyday Barf”), Myles continues in this spirit. In the opening untitled poem, the speaker claims “I’m grasping / the present.” The speaker does not try to grasp the present and is not grasping at the present. No, the speaker grasps the present with a firm hand. The poem ends:

the world

in our

hands a rattle

such a

joke

we shake it

shake it

shake it

Sorry, Tree is a book of love poems that celebrate a love of life, a love of others, and a love learned through loss. The poems take place over a tumultuous time in United States history and are in part an examination of what it means to be alive and American in this current political situation. The poet is an activist who participated in protests during the RNC 2004 convention in NYC, a longtime New York resident who witnessed the events of September 11th from a rooftop, a writer who declares she is “Gay to be glad to keep expressing and knowing the impossible hopes of women and men,” someone who always thinks “the public problem is theirs,” someone who has “accomplished bright cynicism, then struggle[s] for love” (from “To Hell”). And somehow during this era, the poems seem to be largely about pleasure—about finding pleasure in defeat, about finding a way to fight and struggle and live in a world where “everyone loses their friends” (from “Each Defeat”). In “Lodovico,” Myles writes:

I called

Bob & he said

Eileen I’m dying.

Do I say Bye.

While the

cars keep curling

up the road,

I’m here.

It’s a square

of a place

when the bed

chases me

awake

and the gleam

in the sky

that sweet curl

of white

says no. I’ve got

to live.

It is this spirit of having to live that pervades the poems. Even in failure there is a need to continue. Failure is a part of life and “Each defeat / Is sweet” (from “Each Defeat”). In “For Jordana,” Myles describes writing as the feeling of space and language in time. The poem concludes “yet being / here somehow, / open”. The last line is unpunctuated, leaving the poem physically open on the page.

Many of Myles’ poems move fast and furious—sometimes physically traveling distances, from Boston to New York to San Diego, by boat and land; sometimes traveling the way thoughts leap internally, from protests to puking to her mother to childhood to Bob Dylan to jerking off. According to Myles, Dylan said “if you write while you’re moving, it’s good.” Myles’ poems feel as though they were written while moving and they’re good. The poems travel distances in line breaks and between words. The language has a pulse: “All these words were living” (from “Everyday Barf”). There is a restlessness that doesn’t come from uneasiness. No, the restlessness stems from the desire to be doing something/experiencing something new, a desire to turn the everyday into something unique: a single day.

A poet with a clear punk rock aesthetic, Myles doesn’t shy away from any subject matter. Traditional ideas of beauty occur alongside vomit and shit. A love poem involves rimming and fisting. There remains a sense of urgency throughout—the poet has something that needs to be said, something that she will say even if there is no one to read it: “I’m sorry I need to stay in my fog / & dictate these details / to no one” (from “Now”). Writing itself is wanting: “I think writing / is desire / not a form / of it” (from “For Jordana”).

Myles concludes her presentation “Everyday Barf” with the phrase: “It was good to be here.” This here may refer to the panel itself, but has larger implications. It was good to be here. It is good to be here. Here today. Here now. Alive.