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Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation

from Midwinter Constellation

1   ☆   dreams If I could train my dreams it might beonly to be able to remember them.If dreams might be the impressions leftfrom yesterday mine would be of lions,3000…

Bernadette Mayer, Contemporaries Essays

Unsolicited Attention

For the first decade of my love for Bernadette Mayer, I was sad about the “lack of scholarly attention” to her work. This was, in retrospect, a boringly professional complaint:…

Bernadette Mayer, Contemporaries Essays

We May Just Fall

At first, there was only the Creator. “All else was endless space. There was no beginning, and no end, no time, no shape, no life,” wrote the Christian mystic &…

Bernadette Mayer, Contemporaries Essays

Incomprehensible Parts: Reproduction and Comparison in Works & Days (2016)

In the six-line poem “Sway Bar Blues” from 2016’s Works & Days, Bernadette Mayer wittily captures the Sisyphean quality of labor: Oh sway barAnother incomprehensibleAutomobile part, it cost$200 to fix…

Bernadette Mayer, Contemporaries Essays

“Just to distract you like the inside”: a correspondence wrapped up in Bernadette Mayer’s poetry

THE COLOR RED “as each moment of love is past I fear so heartily the loss of it wishing it only to begin again as quickly as the fire becomes…

Bernadette Mayer, Contemporaries Essays

Utopia in Her Time: On the Social Worlds of Bernadette Mayer

This past February, Bernadette Mayer and Philip Good collaborated on a poem, written from their vantage point upstate in East Nassau, NY. Cheeky and poignant, the verses are stuffed with…

Bernadette Mayer, Contemporaries Essays

Sounding Memory

1. “I set myself up” On a visit to the Naropa Institute in 1978, Bernadette Mayer regaled students with a story about the remarkable Russian memory artist Solomon Shereshevsky, the…

Bernadette Mayer, Contemporaries Essays

Almost Famous

In 1968 or 1969, Bernadette Mayer spent part of an afternoon reading The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 by Andrew Sarris.1 She hated it. She wrote a letter to…

Bernadette Mayer, Contemporaries Essays

The Making of Memory: An Interview with Lisa Pearson of Siglio Press

I spent many hours of the otherwise fretful Covid spring and summer of 2020 preparing to review the new edition of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, published by Siglio Press. The particulars…

Bernadette Mayer, Contemporaries Essays

Manly Things

Couplet I adore you it’s my habitI want manly things & should not, women come to me1 Bernadette Mayer’s poetry is finally getting the attention it deserves. But what form…