Note: Please see the companion essay on publishing and the bullshit of professionalized literature.
Preface
A year ago, on November 22nd, the poet Bernadette Mayer passed away at 77. For a whole lifetime, she stayed true to her own advice: “Work your ass off to change the language, and don’t ever get famous.” It’s hard to overstate just how beloved she and her memory are to poets in the US. Her books were like invitations into her mind, a chance to hang out while she transcribed her thought process in a state of improvisational freedom and documentary clarity. Her poems adhered to the basic facts of a domestic life while imbuing them with new imaginative possibility. She was cosmic in her ordinariness, always alert to the ever-intensifying convergences of language and consciousness.
So much has been said about Mayer that it’s difficult to add anything meaningful, especially since there are so many personal remembrances and anecdotes and letters and other ephemera out there. For poets, writing to, for, or about her is maybe too obvious, perhaps even presumptuous. But as I was going through some old notes, I came across a piece I began shortly after her passing last year, and it feels right to share it here. It’s written in a mode that bears her influence in many ways, though my own interests and voice are of course all over the place. My intention is to extend this poem into a chapbook, because there is much more to say from within it—and because I like the challenge of longer forms.
Here’s to the memory of Bernadette Mayer.
from A Total Room
Dear Bernadette, to start this I’m reading you on the Kindle app. It’s betrayal but I need a screen bc my eyes and I can’t find a .pdf of your Reader. (Does the ghost of James Laughlin need to eat my money?) And what’s this guilty feeling of being a consumer in a hell of perfect items Imagination is the air. Every cop antenna falls apart. and the professional non-profits teaching us higher rents for books and certificates and staring into the dead river of the plaque? Why not seize the materials like squirrels, drop them in a living room with satellites of staplers and razor blades on pink cardstock, shreds and toner drums asleep in the wires' nest? You don’t need a lawyer’s dead auditorium for the unpaid labor of atmosphere. That’s what I take from you, Bernadette: We’re already a factory! Our heart is in our actual chest! to go and make the poem a total room for everybody’s mind, where everything occurs like shifting currents of an eternity there is no money for. * But it goes forward in every direction and the past is a map too. In 1979, pictures of you in rooms watching near- equinox light with children whose entire imaginations wore a reflex of woodgrain, of dreams scrawled by domestic architecture (the mirrors busy in silence after anger). In December that year, I was born. Stapling together pages of dwarf planet data. Hands placed me in a cradle upstairs, across from a laundromat in a small Ohio town, and nobody told me about poetry until my mind died in adolescence. It’s funny, you spend your time learning how the mess you got thrown in happened, and then what: just syntax, texture, owls and eyes— yesses of course, but often annihilation rides the traffic of everybody’s listening, hidden even in things that look like career. It’s simpler maybe to find actual mornings somewhere private, a midwest of rooms, music like faucets, the letters coming in from everywhere, but you know at least Letterpress frontal cortex, myofascial scansion. there’s sunlight enough, and the bruises are just chromatic riffs, and the reel turns and our faces are a part of the film. * For you, I was going to print up sulking battery poems and alphabet soup poems and Turtle shell, magnetic tape, eraser crumbs, nebula. carbon dated poems and beluga whale video so cute! poems and missing person found poems and algebra poems and pneumatic drill for sale poems and subluxation in lower spine prevents sitting for more than an hour at a stretch poems and asteroid poems always asteroid poems and middle C poems and what do they call this exact shade of blue poems and the senator’s husband’s crush poems and even new moth poems for the knots of this fake wood paneling. I thought maybe we’d all enjoy ourselves, track the salamanders, the language of faces. Instead, it’s old calendars nailed to the wall. Militant cardiography! Discipline of warmth! It’s loose twine and mercury. Blurry. It’s the weeks it took. The giving, a sieve. It’s background radiation, an iris, an ellipse. An American evening, a Saturday, 9:06 PM w/time stalled twice in the education and no city to plant the music in. * So fascinated by life, you created it, you raised up children of pliant imagination, told stories of names and histories of home. I wonder if you’d recognize whatever life surrounds me, its isolate flickering, rich w/antidotes, substitutes, archives bewildered into singing. Any mirror is just a stop sign, cheap real estate, the wrecked sea. And death is only clothing, a way the branches have of holding the microphone. Its voice’s edge eats starlight, holds greenness in the arteries. And I can’t help the electricity and locks I've torn apart out of muddy gratitude. How I get here, waking without dread? Pleasant now my mind is not against me. Honored now I'm not the winter fly. A little figurine, a corpse-toy left to sun. I look back at the hospital dream of ‘79 and it's a box of photographs of Jupiter and trees and cafeterias of the ancients and it feels like there is nothing but morning. I see your old living room lit up too and no one sleeps in eternity anymore. We're all awash in solar euphoria’s signal jam, w/adult poets on floors of home writing out the brain’s magnetic air. Look, we're leaving receipts written up with noises Agitated, instigated, perforated, enumerated, slated. and stealing jobs in a maze of old refusals. It's the real patience of a thumbtack cosmos: tracking accidents as a breed of insight, learning losses as the pollen bursts.