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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:…

“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…

“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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

On December 22, 2018, the 40th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer’s writing of her epic of dailiness, Midwinter Day, 31 women poets joined me in typing into six Google Docs labeled…