Books by Bernadette Mayer
Midwinter Day
Perhaps Bernadette Mayer's greatest work, Midwinter Day was written on December 22, 1978, at 100 Main Street, Lenox, Massachusetts. "Midwinter Day," as Alice Notley noted, "is an epic poem about a daily routine." A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again: ". . . a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December//Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/That takes the bite from winter weather/And weaves the random cloth of life together/And drives away the long black night!"
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The Helens of Troy, New York (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)
Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet Series", All the Helens of Troy is Bernadette Mayers's profile of all of the Helens living in Troy, New York, done with poems and images.
Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet Series", All the Helens of Troy is Bernadette Mayers's profile of all of the Helens living in Troy, New York, done with poems and images, mixing the classical with the ordinary and delightful intelligence with irreverence.
An excerpt:
everybody died
there’s nothing more to say
my hair’s braided like a family
i took off, it was fun, i loved it
if you did something wrong, they punished you
one helen is enough, trust me
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Poetry Pamphlets 1-4 (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)
by Lydia Davis, Eliot Weinberger, Susan Howe, Bernadette Mayer, Sylvia Legris
The first four collections in our revitalized Poetry Pamphlet series, established to highlight original work from writers around the world as well as forgotten treasures lost in the cracks of literary history.
Included are: Two American Scenes: Our Village & A Journey on the Colorado River, by Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger; Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Chris Marker, by Susan Howe; The Helens of Troy, New York, by Bernadette Mayer; and Pneumatic Antiphonal, by Sylvia Legris.
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Works and Days
A brand spanking new collection, Works and Days is classic Bernadette Mayer: fresh, learned, exciting, and endlessly surprising Part springtime journal (“why are there thorns?”), Works and Days meditates on the first wasps and chipmunks of the season, times’ passage, grackle hearts, and dandelions, while also collecting dozens of poems considering the Catholic Church, Sir Thomas Browne, “Go Away” welcome mats, books, floods (“never of dollar money”), the invention of words, local politics, friendships, property development, dogs, and Hesiod. Every page delights. As the poet herself notes: “My name is Bernadette Mayer, sometimes / I am at the head of my class.”
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0 To 9: The Complete Magazine, 1967-1969
by Bernadette Mayer, Vito Acconci
Published from 1967 to 1969 in seven limited mimeographed editions, 0 to 9 was edited by artist Vito Acconci and poet Bernadette Mayer. Seeking to explore the relationship between language and the page, Mayer and Acconci brought together the pioneers of 1960s experimental poetry and conceptual art. Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper, Dan Graham, Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, Robert Barry, Les Levine, Robert Smithson, Hannah Weiner, Emmett Williams, Dick Higgins, Yvonne Rainer, Aram Saroyan, Bernar Venet, Alan Sondheim and the editors themselves are but a few of the artists and writers who appeared in 0 to 9.
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A Bernadette Mayer Reader (New Directions Paperbook)
“She writes as if Everything were still possible in the work of a lifetime at the coincidence of all the turvy moments. Better that she’s read without a thought to stop. Best so this world is found changed.” ―Clark Coolidge “What a clear, insistent health there is here––as if the so-called world were seriously the point, which it is, and we could actually live in it, which we do. Truly this is the best How To book I've read in years. Bernadette Mayer makes a various world of real people in real times and places, a fact of love and loving use. She has impeccable insight and humor. She is a consummate poet no matter what’s for supper or who eats it. Would that all genius were as generous.” ―Robert Creeley
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Desires Mothers to Please Others in Letters
Co-published with SplitLevel Texts
Endlessly inclusive, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, first published in 1994 and long out of print, evokes the complexity of real persons as it simultaneously reinvents multiple genres: epistle, prose poem, and memoir. Written between 1979 and 1980 while pregnant with her third child, Mayer extends her imaginative letters into meditations for us all on life as it is lived in real time, with its responsibilities and manifold desires. Fierce, lyrical, intimate, and wise, both new and familiar readers, both mothers and non-mothers, will find this book beckoning again and again to offer delicious writing, timely information, consolation, and advice.
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Studying Hunger Journals
In 1972 Bernadette Mayer began this project as an aid to psychological counseling, writing in parallel journals so that, as she wrote in one (in bed, on subways, at parties, etc.), her psychiatrist read the other. Using colored pens to color-code emotions, she recorded dreams, events, memories, and reflections in a language at once free-ranging and precise-a work that creates its own poetics. She sought a workable code, or shorthand, for the transcription of every event, every motion, every transition of her own mind and to perform this process of translation on herself in the interest of evolving an innovative, inquiring language. Studying Hunger Journals registers this intention within a body of poetry John Ashbery has called magnificent.
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Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer (Shp Archive Editions)
Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Bernadette Mayer has been one of the most influential poets of the late 20th century and into the present. Her celebrated and revolutionary first books have long been out of print, available on the secondary market at high costs, by loan or via single-page facsimiles online at Eclipse. While these early books have played an oceanic role in the formation of generations of poets, they are difficult to secure, meaning that opportunities to read them, let along examine them critically, has proven challenging at best. Their operative life has been reduced to rumor and/or brief excerpts, such as New Directions' Bernadette Mayer Reader. This unfortunate gap in the continuum of American experimental poetry is bridged with the publication of Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The First Books of Bernadette Mayer. This multi-book collection includes Ceremony Latin; Red Book in Three Parts; Story; Moving; Poetry; Eruditio Ex Memoria; and The Golden Book of Words. (Studying Hunger Journals, also from this period, was published in 2011 by Station Hill; Memory is forthcoming from Black Widow Press.) This new edition will be an important acquisition for students of contemporary poetry, scholars and libraries.
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Scarlett Tanager: Poetry
New work from one of America's most original experimental poets. Comprised almost entirely of never-before-collected poems, Scarlet Tanager is Bernadette Mayer's first collection of new work in nearly a decade. Mayer, "one of the most original writers of her generation" (The Washington Post), has mixed together here delightful epigrams ("The Mammal Epigram": "Sexually / it's cute"), long-line free verse, and her astonishing sonnets. There are also curious translations of Mayer poems into joking, free-styling French, which are then re-translated back into English, landing somewhere extremely witty and quite some ways from the original. There is no one writing today who can touch Bernadette Mayer for sheer pleasure and throw-away brilliance.
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Proper Name & Other Stories (New Directions Paperback; 824)
Proper Name collects for the first time the inimitable stories of Bernadette Mayer―"one of the most original writers of her generation" (The Washington Post).
The nineteen narratives of Proper Name include "My Excellent Novel," "Ice Cube Epigrams," "Essay: How Carefully Do We Tend?" and "Juan Gave Nora a Pomegranate." Mayer's structural inventions are terrific and unique. As Fanny Howe remarked in The American Book Review, "In a language made up of idiom and lyricism, Mayer cancels the boundaries between prose and poetry."
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Sonnets: Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition
Poetry. Edited by Lee Ann Brown. SONNETS, first published in 1989 as Tender Buttons Number 1 is widely considered to be one of the most generative and innovative works of contemporary American poetry, radically rethinking the traditional sonnet form. This expanded 25th Anniversary edition includes a new preface by Bernadette Mayer, an editor's note by Tender Buttons Press publisher Lee Ann Brown, and a selection of previously unpublished archival material including the Skinny Sonnets, described as "Hypnogogic Word Playing in Reporters' Notebooks" which further expand our map of Bernadette Mayer's ground- breaking works of writing consciousness.
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Poetry State Forest
“One of the most interesting, exciting, and open of late-20th century experimental poets.”―Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle Bernadette Mayer mixes together nature poems, pastiches, sonnets, prose poetry, and epigrams to create Poetry State Forest.
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The Cave (Adventures in Poetry)
by Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge
The Cave is a collaboration of prose, poetry, dialogue, and song alternately written by Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer in their early thirties. Assembled between 1972 and 1978, The Cave explores the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the nature of language, and the connections between the present and past. It constantly challenges the reader to question reality, time, and the poets themselves. The work ranges from complex and imagistic rambles through imaginary landscapes to terse, clear accounts of exploring Eldon’s Cave in western Massachusetts, the setting of several of Coolidge’s poems. Like a mystery novel, The Cave draws the reader in with hints that all the strands weave together into a coherent picture.
Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer have been writing for over fifty years, and they have both had an unquantifiable impact on the direction of experimental poetry. In the words of Marcella Durand, who provides an introduction to The Cave, “Coolidge and Mayer evidently shared a common mission in their writings to encompass consciousness, language, and the intricacy of physical/scientific/geologic structures, and to cross whatever fake borders had been set up between genres, materials, or even words themselves.”
Clark Coolidge lives in Petaluma, California. His most recent books include Far Out West, published by Adventures in Poetry, and Bomb, a collaboration with Keith Waldrop, published by Granary Books.
Bernadette Mayer has experimented with numerous forms of media, including film, collage, stories, and poems. Her most recent books include Scarlet Tanager and A Bernadette Mayer Reader, both published by New Directions.
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Another Smashed Pinecone
Product Description
Poetry. "It's OK that poetry won't save us from circumstance, or pave our road to what we're tempted to call Heaven, but it doesn't matter—because reading Bernadette Mayer's poetry is where I always want to be. Here, within the playfulness of her language, is where consequences of daily living are histories of heart and mind. Poetry is in life and life is in Bernadette's poetry, and that's all the reassurance we need"—Kristin Prevallet.
About the Author
Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received her B.A. from the New School for Social Research in 1967. She is the author of more than two dozen volumes of poetry including
Ethics of Sleep (2011),
Poetry State Forest (2008),
Scarlet Tanager (2005),
Two Haloed Mourners (1998), ANOTHER SMASHED PINECONE (1998),
Proper Name and Other Stories (1996),
The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994),
The Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992),
The Formal Field of Kissing (1990),
Sonnets (1989),
Midwinter Day (1982),
The Golden Book of Words (1978), and CEREMONY LATIN (1964). From 1972 to 1974, Mayer and conceptual artist Vito Acconci edited the journal
0 TO 9, and in 1977 she established United Artists Press with the poet Lewis Warsh. She has taught writing workshops at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City for many years, and she served as the Poetry Project's director during the 1980s. Bernadette Mayer lives in East Nassau, New York.
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The Golden Book of Words
This landmark early book (its original printing by Angel Hair Books was 750 copies, and they are now extremely rare) by the late great Bernadette Mayer is finally available again, both as a tribute and a joy to read. Mayer was a marvelous poet in every stage of her long and prolific writing life, but many fans most admire her restless, powerful, sexy, and erudite early work. One of her signal elements is a certain deadpan wit, on full display here with classics such as "Lookin' Like Areas of Kansas" or "What Babies Really Do," or the marvelous "Essay":
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 start farming
I guess farming is not in the cards now...
I guess farming is really out ...
I don't want to be a farmer but my mother was right
I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat
Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve
That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes
Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing
Or on as little as one needs to survive
Steadfast as any farmer and fixed as the stars
Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly
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