Bernadette Mayer

In the diamond at the heart of the moon

Sixty-nine notes before the US elections, part 1

Michael Ruby and Sam Truitt, curators
Photo of a photo from a wall in Omar Perez’s apartment in Havana

Sam Truitt
In memory of David Graeber (1961–2020)

American poetry and political defeat

Michael Ruby and Sam Truitt, curators

IN THE first election year that mattered to me, 1968, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, my country killed hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia, and Richard Nixon was elected president. In the decades that followed, I have always been unhappy with the leadership and direction of this country, usually very unhappy. 

 

Michael Ruby

 I was born a believer in peace. I say fight for the right.
Be a martyr and live. Be a coward and die.

— Susan B. Anthony speaking
in Gertrude Stein’s
“The Mother of Us All”

Episode 6: Bernadette Mayer

Poetry at the Rail Park
Bernadette Mayer smiling at the camera with her hair in braids
Photo of Bernadette Mayer courtesy of Walker Art Center.

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Bernadette Mayer, whose poetry is included in the Rail Park, is the author of over thirty books, including Midwinter Day, The Golden Book of Words, Utopia, Studying Hunger, and Sonnets, to name just a few. Her most recent book is Work and Days.

June 5, 2020

G R G W R G R B R B R B W G W G R B B B B

Reflections on Bernadette Mayer’s ‘Studying Hunger Journals’

Matthew Rana
Bernadette Mayer visiting the Kelly Writers House on March 26, 2018.
Bernadette Mayer visiting the Kelly Writers House on March 26, 2018, for a Fellows reading. Photo by Kelly Writers House staff.

In the reflections that follow, I refer to media-archaeological reassessments of psychoanalytic theory as a way of opening American poet Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals (1972–1975) to new readings. If, as argued by the likes of Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Kittler, among others, psychoanalytic models of the human mind, from the “psychic apparatus” of Sigmund Freud to the schema of Jacques Lacan, are in fact underwritten by the media-technical conditions of their respective historical eras, then how might this insight shift perspectives on Mayer’s book, a project undertaken not only as an aid to psychoanalysis, but also at the dawn of the so-called Information Age? 

Jacques (Lacan) has wise words 4 me, it’s 2 good to B true, you’re 2 good to B’dette. — Bernadette Mayer, Studying Hunger Journals[1]

Saying it all is literally impossible. — Jacques Lacan, Television[2]

June 4, 2020

Mike Hennessey picks five PennSound recordings

PennSound podcast #54

PennSound podcasts
Michael S. Hennessey.

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Michael Hennessey, one of the founding participants of the PennSound archive, and now its editor, stopped by the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House a few months back. He and Al Filreis played and discussed five recordings Mike chose from among the tens of thousands of recordings available in the archive: Bernadette Mayer, “Chocolate Poetry Sonnet”: LINK; Allen Ginsberg, “After Lalon”: LINK; Lew Welch, “A Round of English”: LINK; Harryette Mullen, “Sleeping with the Dictionary”: LINK; and Tuli Kupferberg, “The Hidden Dissuaders”: LINK.

March 14, 2017

Thirteen poems by Bernadette Mayer

Michael Ruby
Sam Truitt

These poems come from Bernadette Mayer’s long-unpublished early book, The Old Style Is Finding out Something about a Whole New Set of Possibilities, which was written mostly from 1966 to 1970, when Mayer was between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five. Unlike the majority of the poems in the book, they were never published in any form until their appearance in Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer (Station Hill Press, 2015), which we coedited. When Mayer began The Old Style, she was a student at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, taking poetry classes from Bill Berkson.

March 2, 2016

15 Times

Bernadette Mayer

Maybe when time was and made me the time

many times could we and in time when the time came

noticed that and gave you the time of and left him the

left it open for any time and got back on time and how

the time he and served out the time and never noticed

covered up that time and said we’d see some time and kept

March 2, 2016

Day

Bernadette Mayer

              The nights let us have leaves

 

                       we have them           the leaves have let us

 

March 2, 2016

"The sun's in my eyes …"

Bernadette Mayer

                                            The

 

               Sun’s  in  my  eyes  and

 

March 2, 2016

Split Decision

Bernadette Mayer

My partner and I were hunting cougars in

Colorado’s Book Cliffs. Our hounds treed

a cat at dusk, but some were baying near

a cave. I leaned into cave and struck match

right in face of a bear. Though supposedly

hibernating, big bear and her cub were not.

Big one walloped me, nearly breaking my

March 2, 2016
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