reading a poet’s life preconceived ends real life of the poet impressions accidental animals’ intelligence 1 If the last half century has a poet of daily life — of its dreams, babies, children,…
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Bernadette Mayer, Contemporaries Essays
Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
You
Synecdoche is a problem. We let parts stand in for wholes, because we can handle parts, and we are overwhelmed by wholes. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the whole…
Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
Bloch
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:…
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Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
Anderson
“I know our / dates did not align, my / day your night, a slight / thing, I tell / myself,” I wrote at the end of December 23, 2018…
Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
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…
Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
Madden
Written in semi-quarantine with my two young daughters in 2018 (my husband had a stomach virus and we were trying to avoid infecting my mother, whose home we were visiting…
Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
Heim
It mattered to me that Midwinter Day was 40 because I was 40, too. I was fudging, a bit — just two weeks from my 41st birthday. Had I been…
Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
Tate
The invitation to revisit Midwinter Day and write in collaborative homage was an invitation to return to the book I’d cut my scholarly teeth on. Rereading Mayer’s lists, walks, and…