I’ve always tried to avoid long, meaningful conversations with authority figures of any kind. Since I either refuse or cannot seem to seek out advice, recommendations, or insight from those who are wiser than I, it’s always a shock of raw, shattering joy when someone smart gives me a tip. I will never forget the day my sophomore year poetry workshop leader (then younger than I am now) looked past my overly earnest, drecky poetry to see the desperately floundering person behind it and said “you should check out Bernadette Mayer. I think you’d like her.” So it happened that the day I managed to sit in a cold marble library reading “The Golden Book of Words,” a chapbook from 1978, was a time of great personal growth. The first thing I noticed about this early work from Bernadette Mayer was that she mentioned beer all the time. Having recently taken an interest in this poetic topic, I thought: “nice.” The second thing I noticed was that I was crying. It was boundless, and it was boring. I had been given my first piece of truly good advice.
Beginning with a sonnet, written to her then-partner, Lewis, Mayer’s “poems transgress the seasons of two years” of freeing the language and getting cold in late 1970’s New England. In these poems domesticity is a gentle tyrant – shaping the days and the work while creating unique spaces for the mind to wander – can we ever write well whilst waiting for the milk to cool?
Beginning with a sonnet, written to her then-partner, Lewis, Mayer’s “poems transgress the seasons of two years” of freeing the language and getting cold in late 1970’s New England. In these poems domesticity is a gentle tyrant – shaping the days and the work while creating unique spaces for the mind to wander – can we ever write well whilst waiting for the milk to cool?
The milk for yogurt cools down/ I wish it could cool faster/ So I can’t avoid it either / I found a book for my sister about old and new lace / a testament to Savoy’s Queen Margherita / Not Savoy Massachusetts by Savoia, Italy / The author was a woman named Cora from Chicago, 1893 / My mother never ate yogurt
She writes in “The Marble Faun,” ticking back and forth between everything ever and the thing on the stove. This pendulum moved me, and I looked back at my own poetry, so mired in one small thought at a time, and felt like I had a chance to escape from a trap. It was the poem “Essay,” though, towards the end of the book, that I found the most productively unsettling. “I guess it’s too late to live on the farm/I guess it’s too late to move to a farm/I guess it’s too late to begin farming” she writes, and continues – I guess, I guess – fourteen straight lines of uncertainty. All of the poets who might have been farmers, or failed to be farmers, all of the anxiety about doing the “right” kind of work, a poem about poetry, which can so often be annoying, that stuck in my gut through its grasp and exploitation of the mundane. A poem in which language is not enough. Which, ahem, reminds me of why I care about theater – but I digress.
I could probably write about The Golden Book of Words forever (along with “Midwinter Day,” Mayer’s epic poem from the same period), but I fear that it wouldn’t feel terribly interesting. As director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the 1980’s, Mayer taught “Experiments in Poetry” workshops, in which she encouraged participants to do things like “systematically derange the language.” It would be more fitting, I think, to write about these poems using only prepositional phrases, as she suggested, or perhaps using only letters that looked a certain way. Fortunately, everything I’ve ever tried to express about these poems in any sweaty late-night essays I’ve ever tried to write was immediately and completely communicated when I first read a few of them aloud to Piehole last January. We were meeting for a bit of a lazy Sunday book club at the time, looking for materials and flinging everything we’d ever enjoyed into the room. It was cold, and I brought in my copy of The Golden Book of Words. We’d just finished reading a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, and we noticed a Hawthorne quote at the beginning of one of Mayer’s poems, “Lookin Like Areas of Kansas” – it simply said “We had our first cucumber yesterday.” We felt like we had a puzzle to solve.
- Allison
She writes in “The Marble Faun,” ticking back and forth between everything ever and the thing on the stove. This pendulum moved me, and I looked back at my own poetry, so mired in one small thought at a time, and felt like I had a chance to escape from a trap. It was the poem “Essay,” though, towards the end of the book, that I found the most productively unsettling. “I guess it’s too late to live on the farm/I guess it’s too late to move to a farm/I guess it’s too late to begin farming” she writes, and continues – I guess, I guess – fourteen straight lines of uncertainty. All of the poets who might have been farmers, or failed to be farmers, all of the anxiety about doing the “right” kind of work, a poem about poetry, which can so often be annoying, that stuck in my gut through its grasp and exploitation of the mundane. A poem in which language is not enough. Which, ahem, reminds me of why I care about theater – but I digress.
I could probably write about The Golden Book of Words forever (along with “Midwinter Day,” Mayer’s epic poem from the same period), but I fear that it wouldn’t feel terribly interesting. As director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the 1980’s, Mayer taught “Experiments in Poetry” workshops, in which she encouraged participants to do things like “systematically derange the language.” It would be more fitting, I think, to write about these poems using only prepositional phrases, as she suggested, or perhaps using only letters that looked a certain way. Fortunately, everything I’ve ever tried to express about these poems in any sweaty late-night essays I’ve ever tried to write was immediately and completely communicated when I first read a few of them aloud to Piehole last January. We were meeting for a bit of a lazy Sunday book club at the time, looking for materials and flinging everything we’d ever enjoyed into the room. It was cold, and I brought in my copy of The Golden Book of Words. We’d just finished reading a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, and we noticed a Hawthorne quote at the beginning of one of Mayer’s poems, “Lookin Like Areas of Kansas” – it simply said “We had our first cucumber yesterday.” We felt like we had a puzzle to solve.
- Allison
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