Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022)
Author of Midwinter Day
Works by Bernadette Mayer
The Desires of Mothers To Please Others In Letters (The Literature Profile Series, 1) (1994) 27 copies
Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Collected Early Books of Bernadette Mayer (Shp Archive Editions) (2015) 8 copies
Red Book in Three Parts 2 copies
Two Thousand Journals 2 copies
Uncle Andrew's Pile of Pads 1 copy
United Artists Thirteen 1 copy
Experiences 1 copy
from the Ethics of Sleep 1 copy
Associated Works
The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (2016) — Contributor — 78 copies
The Serpent and the Fire: Poetries of the Americas from Origins to Present (2024) — Contributor — 17 copies
Unmuzzled Ox 13 — Contributor — 7 copies
Big Deal #2 — Contributor — 3 copies
Strange Faeces 15 — Contributor — 1 copy
Lines, No. 6 — Contributor — 1 copy
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Number 13, (Vol. 3, No. 3) — Contributor — 1 copy
Telephone 14 — Contributor — 1 copy
Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Number 13, The Anne Waldman Issue — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1945-05-12
- Date of death
- 2022-11-22
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- poet
artist
editor
teacher - Organizations
- 0 TO 9 (cofounder, coeditor)
The Poetry Project, St. Mark's Church, New York
United Artists Press (cofounder) - Relationships
- Mayer, Rosemary (sibling)
Warsh, Lewis (former partner)
Warsh, Marie (offspring) - Cause of death
- cancer (pancreatic, complications)
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Brooklyn, New York, USA
- Place of death
- East Nassau, New York, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- New York, USA
Members
Reviews
In July 1971 the experimental poet Bernadette Mayer, associated with the New Your and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school of poets, committed herself to shooting a a roll of 36 photos a day on slide film, after being taught to shoot on 35mm by her then boyfriend, the film maker Ed Bowles. This resulted in 1,100 photographs. In February 1972 the photographs were turned into an exhibition, Memory, that showed in a loft space in downtown New York. Prior to the exhibition she recorded a narrative while show more reviewing them, attempting to reconstruct her memories of the time. This resulted in nearly six hours of poetry that played alongside the photographs, originally shot on slide film, that were printed out in snapshot format and mounted together in order. The work was reprised in various condensed forms, including a text edition in 1975. This was the recent Siglio Press edition that combined the text and images for the first time.
I loved this. For sure a high tolerance for experimental art and a fascination with this era, and its countercultural milieu, helped. But the baggy nature of the text, and the fact that both words and even pictures, were occasionally out of focus directly reflected the events and lives depicted. What you get is a portrait of a particular moment in time as the artist and her friends, all in their 20's, travel back and forth between a decaying New York and the rural depths of western Massachusetts, in the process of making a film, hanging out and trying to figure out how to make art with no money, how to be in relationships and what shape their lives might take. It's emotionally raw at times. Mayer later described suffering a kind of breakdown by the end of the project and it's clear that she is suffering under, and chafing against the ubiquitous sexism that permeated this era.
The work was a deliberate experiment with memory and should be considered in this light. Mayer chose to shoot on Kodachrome: something reflected in the reds and yellows that shine out amid the supermarkets, diners, muscle cars and back roads she photographs. Few film stocks seem as evocative of an era in the cast of it's colours. But memory is not a photograph, it is an act of reconstruction in the imagination. The colour cast of the photographs that capture our memories of a particular era come to tint the memories themselves.
In the 1970's, long before the era of social media, slide shows were a ubiquitous means of sharing images. Hours spent in the dark, in silence, listening for the clunk of projector as one image replaced another. The drone of a voice from the back of the room narrating a holiday through the repetitive contextualisation of images—whether evoking shared memories or engaging in subtle social status games through photos of then exotic destinations. These too reflected the rigidity of gender expectations in that time: man as photographer and narrator, women as objects posed against the background that was the true subject.
I can not know if Mayer ever had these in mind, but I can not help but feel these memories in contrast. There is a curious doubling at play as Mayer defines meaning and asserts her rights to narration through the making of the work, while at the same time the work sometimes shows her struggling to be able to do so in the events depicted, dismissed and hemmed in by the assumptions of the time. It is an antidote we should be careful to take when looking back.
The effect of the words and pictures was to make me feel that I had slipped into that time, standing in the dark, staring through a snapshot size whole that had been cut through, as if the bright clear light of summer could spill out of the page. Looking back at depictions of lives lived in that era can feel almost painfully evocative of time when possibilities were opening out. But we need to guard against the tricks of nostalgia and memory. This was, after all, the era of my own childhood. Perhaps what we sense is not another time and place, not our own, but a time form our own life, leaking across, when we did not yet know what the future would hold. show less
I loved this. For sure a high tolerance for experimental art and a fascination with this era, and its countercultural milieu, helped. But the baggy nature of the text, and the fact that both words and even pictures, were occasionally out of focus directly reflected the events and lives depicted. What you get is a portrait of a particular moment in time as the artist and her friends, all in their 20's, travel back and forth between a decaying New York and the rural depths of western Massachusetts, in the process of making a film, hanging out and trying to figure out how to make art with no money, how to be in relationships and what shape their lives might take. It's emotionally raw at times. Mayer later described suffering a kind of breakdown by the end of the project and it's clear that she is suffering under, and chafing against the ubiquitous sexism that permeated this era.
The work was a deliberate experiment with memory and should be considered in this light. Mayer chose to shoot on Kodachrome: something reflected in the reds and yellows that shine out amid the supermarkets, diners, muscle cars and back roads she photographs. Few film stocks seem as evocative of an era in the cast of it's colours. But memory is not a photograph, it is an act of reconstruction in the imagination. The colour cast of the photographs that capture our memories of a particular era come to tint the memories themselves.
In the 1970's, long before the era of social media, slide shows were a ubiquitous means of sharing images. Hours spent in the dark, in silence, listening for the clunk of projector as one image replaced another. The drone of a voice from the back of the room narrating a holiday through the repetitive contextualisation of images—whether evoking shared memories or engaging in subtle social status games through photos of then exotic destinations. These too reflected the rigidity of gender expectations in that time: man as photographer and narrator, women as objects posed against the background that was the true subject.
I can not know if Mayer ever had these in mind, but I can not help but feel these memories in contrast. There is a curious doubling at play as Mayer defines meaning and asserts her rights to narration through the making of the work, while at the same time the work sometimes shows her struggling to be able to do so in the events depicted, dismissed and hemmed in by the assumptions of the time. It is an antidote we should be careful to take when looking back.
The effect of the words and pictures was to make me feel that I had slipped into that time, standing in the dark, staring through a snapshot size whole that had been cut through, as if the bright clear light of summer could spill out of the page. Looking back at depictions of lives lived in that era can feel almost painfully evocative of time when possibilities were opening out. But we need to guard against the tricks of nostalgia and memory. This was, after all, the era of my own childhood. Perhaps what we sense is not another time and place, not our own, but a time form our own life, leaking across, when we did not yet know what the future would hold. show less
Choose your poison...
My Review, as poem:
The Day's
A book by Bernadette Mayer
that I admire on a morning in late Fall
upon a day in midwinter
that goes mid-way
from poetry's prose to prose poetry
and through a century
of differently graded pencils, a way from
roses are violet to roses are
roses, or
as violence does a day good, a day's end
is in a sort of
dream's hay
spun to a rhythm and a play
conforming to its circular path
upon the footpath that leads away
to only leaves left undisplayed
though large as my papa's hands are
palms stretched all that ways back
to the age of 4
a counter rewinding, re-
wound in my child's mind's black bank
shuttered like seconds are in frames
we each are each
what we remember of that day--
a day's so easy lost
in the shuffle of day-today
a momentary lapse, obscured
in that comment, a look
that quickly gains in significance,
that look, a comment
becomes itself the day
the week the month the winter
and a winter's gone
to its grave--
I did hold it so long
but holding on's not fixed my place
in this going on, forth and back
what is it that
in 'Vertigo' takes the stairs
down and up at the same time
is what
puts me here reading Midwinter Day
in August not December
as I should
I read and I walk
look up from page to page
to where I'm going, in form--the walk
made of pedestrians, cyclists on
the Beltline path newly laid
across the mid-metro belly
my foot has a way
of knowing the words I read are moving
ambiguous, not forward, not back
like a ship on a ship's deck
or that 'Vertigo' thing again
that sense when I'm pulling out
of my parking space
and the other's pooling in
in that space--
a place in time
without referring
I float, memoryless--or
all memory--only
what matters isn't the land
as land is sea too
broken imperceptible over
a breaking sense of senses shifted during flight,
what is there
to return to
but
the day?
the day is a procession
minute hours go by second by second
a procession without meaning, a 'process',
only what I see, I hear
the surface area of that experience--
breakfast, lunch, dinner
(the sound of the fork is silver!)
a six-course meal
(depends how you break the line)
is consumed hand to mouth, bite to bite
(and a car is covered in a tarp)
it is what makes meaning possible--
these meaninglessnesses
that build on seeming
(let be be finale, etc.)
that builds a day so long
so precise--twenty four--
as agreed upon
by whom or what we don't remember
any more
than what year it was
made such an impression on Miss Mayer
that twenty-second of late December
when she was alive
(she's still alive)
we know
all there is to know
but when the evidence is laid out
like a patient etherized upon a table
(oh but what patient, what table,
what day was he or she admitted under what circ-
umstances?)
that white of the white table
medical, sanitary, saintly
the white snow of December
brighter than the sun it gets its brightness from
that bright ether
it seems something's missing
the day has escaped
the day--it is no longer
an accumulation, but, undetected
I see the scene quite well
through a closed opening
without my eyes open
without finding my feet
it is in there in the air
the procession consists of pauses
that make an event an event by separating
the event from the event that follows the event
it is this I worm into
into the day
(though the day is nothing
nothing separated from nothing
by nothing--
the ether of the day dissipates) the ever-
divisible units of matter divide
(atom's a lie, Adam too
in that garden filled with frogs)
full up
nightly mating (sounds as though the sun's gone
down)
this as good as any
undifferentiated day
is from green to red
but a shade--
orange and yellow
a shade
of the season that is Fall
in which I look forward to--and backwards too
to--that midwinter day
by me (Jimmy) in homage to a truly great poem
My Review, as prose:
A few years ago, some friends and I formed a group called ZooPo. We were a 'literary movement' consisting mostly of University of Arizona poetry MFA students, but also some outliers (like me). We didn't exactly have a 'philosophy' or a manifesto or anything, but we did have a sort of general attitude, which I'm not sure we ever spelled out. Guiding principles if you will. First, we were light-hearted, didn't take ourselves too seriously (but in a good way, not a self demeaning way). Secondly, we liked to write about animals (thus the name). Third, we tried to push ourselves with various constraints, challenges, etc.
One of our constraints was we wanted to write a book of poems in one day. This idea came to us from the book Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer, which apparently she wrote entirely on December 22, 1978. We did this relay style, for a week. The first poet would write for a day (and we had several things each poet had to do in the course of the day, to add to the challenge, like visiting the zoo, or visiting one of the other ZooPo poets), and we had a baton that the poet would pass on to the next poet at the designated hour, whereupon the next poet will try to write a book of poems in the next 24 hours.
At the time Midwinter Day was just a concept to me, and I imagined a book that was more accomplished as ours, but still an experiment, so having many of the flaws that our books did. Well, yesterday I read this book and it is no longer a concept to me. Instead it is a brilliant long poem, probably one of the best ones I've read.
Reading it now, it seems to me the written-in-one-day thing is much less of a big deal than the actual poem. In fact, I doubt it was written in one day (it took me all day just to read it, it is 120 pages long). But I feel like that's really not the point. The point is that it is about one day, from waking up from dreams to going to the post office, to lunch, dinner, putting the kids to sleep, and back to sleep and dreams. It continues the tradition of books like Ulysses (the poem has the same first word "Stately") and Mrs. Dalloway, but blends it with the personal and the poetic. Like Ulysses, each of its six parts is written in a slightly different style. And like others who try to contain everything in a day, it seems Whitmanian in its need to catalog everything at times, but that categorization is musical. Some may find these sections boring, but I feel they are extremely important, and enjoyable if read aloud. What day does not have its trivial prosaic moments?
But most of this is soaring with great lines. This is from the first section (which is mostly about waking up from dreams):
Now that our days
Are full of normal parts
It seems we have all lived forever so far
Eyes open, eyes closed, half-open, one eye open
One closed to the coming day, past's insistence,
Dream's vivid presence, no one knows why
Though you can see all I say with half an eye
I always have an eye to fascination, you catch my eye
This meditation
Not on sleep but on awakening
With dreams with everything quickening, you and I
Survive this work and rest, not so much lost,
We only seem to dream as quickly as we live
One for the other to make up time
And it's as if
Today I had someone else's dreams
Everything's the reverse of what it seems
Typing this out I noticed how the poem works so much better as a whole, pulling out sections or lines does not do it justice as it reflects upon itself and doubles back on its own themes time and time again to create this wonderful effect. This poem is also often funny and playful. At least to me. In little ways that make me smile. In ways that don't come through in excerpts. Oh well. Here's part of the second section, which as you see is written in a different style (and also affected by the children's waking up and their speed/rhythm/logic/language):
I know you speak
And are as suddenly forgiven,
It's the consequence of love's having no cause
Then we wonder what we can say
I can say
I turn formally to love to spend the day,
To you to form the night as what I know,
An image of love allows what I can't say,
Sun's lost in the window and love is below
Love is the same and does not keep that name
I keep that name and I am not the same
A shadow of ice exchanges the color of light,
Love's figure to begin the absent night.
My Review, as poem:
The Day's
A book by Bernadette Mayer
that I admire on a morning in late Fall
upon a day in midwinter
that goes mid-way
from poetry's prose to prose poetry
and through a century
of differently graded pencils, a way from
roses are violet to roses are
roses, or
as violence does a day good, a day's end
is in a sort of
dream's hay
spun to a rhythm and a play
conforming to its circular path
upon the footpath that leads away
to only leaves left undisplayed
though large as
palms stretched all that ways back
to the age of 4
a counter rewinding, re-
wound in my child's mind's black bank
shuttered like seconds are in frames
we each are each
what we remember of that day--
a day's so easy lost
in the shuffle of day-today
a momentary lapse, obscured
in that comment, a look
that quickly gains in significance,
that look, a comment
becomes itself the day
the week the month the winter
and a winter's gone
to its grave--
I did hold it so long
but holding on's not fixed my place
in this going on, forth and back
what is it that
in 'Vertigo' takes the stairs
down and up at the same time
is what
puts me here reading Midwinter Day
in August not December
as I should
I read and I walk
look up from page to page
to where I'm going, in form--the walk
made of pedestrians, cyclists on
the Beltline path newly laid
across the mid-metro belly
my foot has a way
of knowing the words I read are moving
ambiguous, not forward, not back
like a ship on a ship's deck
or that 'Vertigo' thing again
that sense when I'm pulling out
of my parking space
and the other's pooling in
in that space--
a place in time
without referring
I float, memoryless--or
all memory--only
what matters isn't the land
as land is sea too
broken imperceptible over
a breaking sense of senses shifted during flight,
what is there
to return to
but
the day?
the day is a procession
minute hours go by second by second
a procession without meaning, a 'process',
only what I see, I hear
the surface area of that experience--
breakfast, lunch, dinner
(the sound of the fork is silver!)
a six-course meal
(depends how you break the line)
is consumed hand to mouth, bite to bite
(and a car is covered in a tarp)
it is what makes meaning possible--
these meaninglessnesses
that build on seeming
(let be be finale, etc.)
that builds a day so long
so precise--twenty four--
as agreed upon
by whom or what we don't remember
any more
than what year it was
made such an impression on Miss Mayer
that twenty-second of late December
when she was alive
(she's still alive)
we know
all there is to know
but when the evidence is laid out
like a patient etherized upon a table
(oh but what patient, what table,
what day was he or she admitted under what circ-
umstances?)
that white of the white table
medical, sanitary, saintly
the white snow of December
brighter than the sun it gets its brightness from
that bright ether
it seems something's missing
the day has escaped
the day--it is no longer
an accumulation, but, undetected
I see the scene quite well
through a closed opening
without my eyes open
without finding my feet
it is in there in the air
the procession consists of pauses
that make an event an event by separating
the event from the event that follows the event
it is this I worm into
into the day
(though the day is nothing
nothing separated from nothing
by nothing--
the ether of the day dissipates) the ever-
divisible units of matter divide
(atom's a lie, Adam too
in that garden filled with frogs)
full up
nightly mating (sounds as though the sun's gone
down)
this as good as any
undifferentiated day
is from green to red
but a shade--
orange and yellow
a shade
of the season that is Fall
in which I look forward to--and backwards too
to--that midwinter day
by me (Jimmy) in homage to a truly great poem
My Review, as prose:
A few years ago, some friends and I formed a group called ZooPo. We were a 'literary movement' consisting mostly of University of Arizona poetry MFA students, but also some outliers (like me). We didn't exactly have a 'philosophy' or a manifesto or anything, but we did have a sort of general attitude, which I'm not sure we ever spelled out. Guiding principles if you will. First, we were light-hearted, didn't take ourselves too seriously (but in a good way, not a self demeaning way). Secondly, we liked to write about animals (thus the name). Third, we tried to push ourselves with various constraints, challenges, etc.
One of our constraints was we wanted to write a book of poems in one day. This idea came to us from the book Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer, which apparently she wrote entirely on December 22, 1978. We did this relay style, for a week. The first poet would write for a day (and we had several things each poet had to do in the course of the day, to add to the challenge, like visiting the zoo, or visiting one of the other ZooPo poets), and we had a baton that the poet would pass on to the next poet at the designated hour, whereupon the next poet will try to write a book of poems in the next 24 hours.
At the time Midwinter Day was just a concept to me, and I imagined a book that was more accomplished as ours, but still an experiment, so having many of the flaws that our books did. Well, yesterday I read this book and it is no longer a concept to me. Instead it is a brilliant long poem, probably one of the best ones I've read.
Reading it now, it seems to me the written-in-one-day thing is much less of a big deal than the actual poem. In fact, I doubt it was written in one day (it took me all day just to read it, it is 120 pages long). But I feel like that's really not the point. The point is that it is about one day, from waking up from dreams to going to the post office, to lunch, dinner, putting the kids to sleep, and back to sleep and dreams. It continues the tradition of books like Ulysses (the poem has the same first word "Stately") and Mrs. Dalloway, but blends it with the personal and the poetic. Like Ulysses, each of its six parts is written in a slightly different style. And like others who try to contain everything in a day, it seems Whitmanian in its need to catalog everything at times, but that categorization is musical. Some may find these sections boring, but I feel they are extremely important, and enjoyable if read aloud. What day does not have its trivial prosaic moments?
But most of this is soaring with great lines. This is from the first section (which is mostly about waking up from dreams):
Now that our days
Are full of normal parts
It seems we have all lived forever so far
Eyes open, eyes closed, half-open, one eye open
One closed to the coming day, past's insistence,
Dream's vivid presence, no one knows why
Though you can see all I say with half an eye
I always have an eye to fascination, you catch my eye
This meditation
Not on sleep but on awakening
With dreams with everything quickening, you and I
Survive this work and rest, not so much lost,
We only seem to dream as quickly as we live
One for the other to make up time
And it's as if
Today I had someone else's dreams
Everything's the reverse of what it seems
Typing this out I noticed how the poem works so much better as a whole, pulling out sections or lines does not do it justice as it reflects upon itself and doubles back on its own themes time and time again to create this wonderful effect. This poem is also often funny and playful. At least to me. In little ways that make me smile. In ways that don't come through in excerpts. Oh well. Here's part of the second section, which as you see is written in a different style (and also affected by the children's waking up and their speed/rhythm/logic/language):
Look at this, see, you do, which one are you. The book is said to be a duck. The color wheel reflecting you hiding, the bus, empty green swing for people, smiling tiger nothingness puzzle, empty-eyed monkey mask right there, battered stolen musical egg, look, bright old playgroup radio playing raindrops and so on, there's something about a thermometer you wouldn't understand yet, silly identical grounded queen bees, you put things into things now, you empty cups and trucks on your own articulating oh and no the same, grabbing for the fifteenth-century Dutch woman who looks chiding, that's why I put her up, that polar bear won't go into that nesting cup.So many more great sections. I can't share them all, or do them justice in little pieces, but here's part of the end of section 5:
I know you speak
And are as suddenly forgiven,
It's the consequence of love's having no cause
Then we wonder what we can say
I can say
I turn formally to love to spend the day,
To you to form the night as what I know,
An image of love allows what I can't say,
Sun's lost in the window and love is below
Love is the same and does not keep that name
I keep that name and I am not the same
A shadow of ice exchanges the color of light,
Love's figure to begin the absent night.
A charming chapbook and a charming concept. Bernadette Mayer writes a poem for each one of the Helens who live in the town of Troy, NY. The poems range from formal whimsy to experimental. Each poem is accompanied by a photo of said Helen in her natural environment. This book made me smile. I loved the poems where she uses the voice of the Helen she is portraying, you really get a sense of these women and the little town they live in. Playfulness abounds.
The question is, do you find Bernadette Mayer's mind to be interesting enough to spend 119 pages of free verse modernist poetry with. Because that's what you get here: her thoughts from a single unremarkable day, and even worse her nighttime dreams, riffed on. I did not.
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