The Midwinter Constellation
In 1980, Bernadette Mayer writes a letter to Alice Notley wondering what would have happened if William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein had married and given birth to their mothers: "who would my mother have married if she were Gertrude Stein's daughter, Mrs. Stein-Carlos, Williams-Hemingway maybe, what would I be, like Margaux or Mariel now today?"1 Even though Mayer's letter is framed by her own pregnancy — "Now this baby inside me is doing everything short of howling, pushing me around incredibly" — it ends not with progeny but with her poetic forefather falling to pieces in a trunk:
For many years, for all the years I had a car, I would always carry around the complete poems of Wm. Carlos Williams in my trunk because I always thought it was somehow necessary to have them there, just like I read somewhere about a taxi-driver, or actually it was that I met one once who told me that he always had a case of beer in his trunk because he knew that no matter what the exigencies of driving around NY might turn out to be, that would be all that he needed. Then sadly when I no longer had a car I found the condition of my Williams books to be awful [.]
Midwinter Day isn't about Williams. It's about what happens when you record your dreams for two weeks and then write a book in a single day of narrowed light on December 22, 1978. It's about drinking beer and making oatmeal in a Lenox, Massachusetts, winter with small children; it's "an epic where you change diapers"; there are plenty of other writers hovering (Joyce, Hawthorn, Catullus) in this "alarming dictionary of reformist love."2 But Williams writes that "The Library is desolation, it has a smell of its own / of stagnation and death,"3 and of course Bernadette ironizes that decay in her dictionary-archive-library manifesting adoration — so Midwinter Day is a little about Williams, if it's about loving a decaying archive, like the rotting wet leaves outside the A-Space in Philadelphia, where I cluster with all the other poets and perch on a wiry chair when it's my turn to read, "I turn formally to love to spend the day,"4 not knowing that two years later I'll put the baby in the black patterned carrier, mask up against the virus, and step out into wet leaves.
Julia Bloch's most recent book of poetry is The Sacramento of Desire. She lives and works in Philadelphia.
References
- Mayer to Notley, 27 January 1980, published as part of Alice Notley's "Doctor Williams' Heiresses" (San Francisco: Tuumba, 1980), n.p.[⤒]
- Personal interview with the author, 2006; Mayer, Midwinter Day (New York: New Directions, 1999), 117.[⤒]
- William Carlos Williams, Paterson, edited by Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1995), 101.[⤒]
- Mayer, Midwinter Day (New Directions, 1982), 94.[⤒]
