In this feature Michael Ruby and Sam Truitt present thirteen poems from Bernadette Mayer’s manuscript The Old Style Is Finding out Something about a Whole New Set of Possibilities, written between 1966 and 1970, along with a critical introduction to the work. This important early collection remained unpublished for forty-five years until its appearance in Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer (Station Hill Press, 2015), also edited by Ruby and Truitt.
Bernadette Mayer in the Kelly Writers House garden, Philadelphia. Photo © 2007 Charles Bernstein/PennSound.
Edited byMichael Ruby Sam Truitt