Andrews

"I'd like to know / What kind of person I must be to be a poet"1 Bernadette Mayer writes, in Midwinter Day. Of course, I have asked myself the same question numerous times, as I struggle to negotiate the public and the private as a mother, citizen, an employee of academe, a lover, a poet. When I was invited, on December 22, 2018, to write among a "constellation" of poets, I felt a thrill at the idea of so many lived experiences taking shape together. Part of the reason that Midwinter Day fascinates me is that it is a project of private-public simultaneity: a record of the dream-images, the mess, the contents of one's refrigerator, the blur between the self and her beloveds.

That morning, as I wrote down whatever shadows of my own dream I could salvage, to make a mark on our communal text, I returned to the beginning of Midwinter Day. Mayer's dream, while particular and internalized as dreams are, is not without an outward address. The "you" is present, and while it may be tempting to relegate it to a specific relationship, such a designation would also sadly miss Mayer's nod to the epic, a gesture of inclusion nearly identical to Dante's immediate communal gesture in the Inferno's first line, when he refers to a time "midway along the journey of our life."2

In an insistence on and spirit of communion, the "you" here fluctuates outside of the real (Mayer writes: "I'm made of you" and also declares the "you" to be time — the beginning of the day) but the "you" is also able to return, to love, to listen. In other parts of the dream, Mayer refers to "our" and "we" and it is clear she is referring to herself and her husband, or daughters — yet the broader "you" of the continuing address persists independently and functions differently from these other addresses; the familial scenes evoke closed, intimate relationships while the "you" seems to propel the dream outward, multiplying the possibilities for community, readership, friends.

In our document, whole scenes begin to appear, another poet awakens. The dream images proliferate, the day is voiced, again and again. Mayer's voice:

To be, as C. D. Wright wrote, "one with others" — is this what one must be, in one way or another, to be a poet? I think of how, if part of the genius of Midwinter Day is in its ongoing attention to what is happening, it is Mayer's responsibility to others that often ties her to the concrete world — when her thoughts begin to wander outside of the day's unfolding, it is, for instance, her children that typically bring her back to the present.

In our document, bicycles, ex-husbands, hashtags. One of us eats half a pancake, one of us avoids the internet until two pm, some of us apologize. Our day's light stretches and constricts across time zones; my own Utah sky whitens, then begins to dim.

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Hanna Andrews is the author of the poetry collection Slope Move and is currently at work on a second book of poems. She is one of the founders of the feminist press Switchback Books, former Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets, and has served as the Managing Editor of Witness. Recent poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Conduit, Harvard Review, Interim, The Missouri Review, Omniverse, and Tarpaulin Sky. She is an Assistant Professor-in-Residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and lives near Red Rock Canyon with her partner and daughter.

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