The Midwinter Constellation
There's something uncanny in reading Bernadette Mayer's conceptual projects of memory and thought. Was it in Moving ("This is an epic of war fever fighting sex & starvation.") or Memory ("This is the part of the sky that cleared first blue")or Midwinter Day ("what I mean is once life begins it has a stasis or a balance or a standing that is what it is, it's not mechanical, what's strange is this") that she describes the arrogance of a man she was once with in a way as to seed in me such a knowing — as if memory — to come, sudden radicle in the dark? Or the moment of the "Marie Maria Callas" tantrum in the public library in Midwinter Day that channels cosmic paroxysmic sight — "She is hard and soft at once, hot and suddenly cool, mad, / She needs water, she needs kneading, she is not at all / [what a line break!] Proportionate to the energy expended, how resilient is she?" Or, the memory of Memory alive in me before I notice it, being struck by the wash of hues — from night blue to peach flesh — as I poured my daughter's paintbrush water into the old white porcelain sink in my apartment kitchen, and then sitting down to think about writing this and revisiting the opening of Memory: "& the main thing is we begin with a white sink a whole new language is a temptation." How that night I had a dream of a small mountain city surrounded by an oceanic presence that glowed those colors from the sink and I felt suffused with love in an otherworldly way — I was a part of some greater non-bodied-ness / everywhere bodied-ness. A whole new language. Maybe the uncanny at work is how Bernadette topples the enclosure (separating poetix from life) on behalf of love. Her projects invite us to different modes of consciousness via writing pre-autocorrectives of normative syntax and style, far away from striving in an MFA-way, foregrounding, as Rubinstine observes in his introduction to Memory, "archaic modes of representation" with fluidity between the "inner and outer," as if the commons of Bernadette are of course the commons of everyone — GIVE EVERYBODY EVERYTHING. Midwinter Day stretches the book to the span of a day and we are flooded with the possibility of attention/memory/association in any given moment. Participating in the Midwinter Day project showed me in my life where there was love to write forward (and where there wasn't). It showed me my daughters and the poets who had gathered in the Wolf House in Minneapolis for a marathon reading of the text and more I maybe wasn't yet ready to see. Writing in the warmth of a sisterhood that day was a remedial poetix. And now? When we find ourselves in this moment of the patriarch who won't die and the question is who killed the world, Bernadette is the anarchist crone on the motorcycle with a bag full of seeds for the new world, showing us how "to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season."
Elisabeth Workman is the author of ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND (Bloof Books), ENDLESSNESS IS NO DESOLATION (Dusie Press), and numerous chapbooks, including The Figures: A Litter (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press). She lives in Minneapolis and can be found in the disembodied realm here: elisabethworkman.com.
