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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:…

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 &…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…