Bernadette Mayer

Bernadette Mayer. Courtesy HiLoBrow.

Bernadette Mayer (born May 12, 1945) is an American poet and prose writer associated with the New York School of poets.

Life

Overview

Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York City. She edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci, and, until 1983, United Artists books and magazines with Lewis Warsh. Mayer taught at the New School for Social Research, (where she earned her degree in 1967), and during the 1970s she led a number of workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York. From 1980 to 1984, Mayer served as director of the Poetry Project. Her influence in the contemporary avant-garde is felt widely.

Youth and education

Mayer was born in a predominantly German part of Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. Her parents were, as she writes in the autobiographical piece, "0–19," "a mother-secretary & father draft dodger WWII electrician." Mayer's parents died when she was in her early teens and her uncle, a legal guardian after the passing of her parents, died only a few years later. She had a sister, Rosemary, a sculptor who was a member of similar conceptual art communities during the 1970s and 80s, in addition to being a founding member of the feminist art space A.I.R. Gallery.

Early in her life Bernadette Mayer lived in Lenox, Massachusetts. She attended Catholic schools, where she studied languages and the classics.

She earned a B.A. from the New School for Social Research in 1967.

Early career

Mayer's work caught public attention with her exhibit Memory, a multimedia work that challenged ideas of narrative and autobiography in conceptual art and created an immersive poetic environment. During July 1971, Mayer photographed a roll of film each day, resulting in a total of 1200 photographs. Mayer then recorded a 31-part narration as she remembered the context of each image, using them as "taking-off points for digression" and to "[fill] in the spaces between." In the premiere full-showing of the exhibit at the 98 Greene Street Loft, the photographs were installed on boards in sequential rows as Mayer's seven-hour audio track played a single time between the gallery's open and close. Memory asked its observer to be a critical student of the work, as one would with any poetic text, while putting herself into the position of the artist.

An early version of Memory, remembering, toured 7 locations in the US and Europe from 1973 to 1974 as part of Lucy R. Lippard's female-centric conceptual art show, "c. 7,500". Memory's audio narration was later edited and turned into a book published by North Atlantic Books in 1976.

Memory served as the jumping off point for Mayer's next book, a 3-year experiment in stream-of-conscious journal writing Studying Hunger (Adventures in Poetry, 1976), and these diaristic impulses would continue to be a significant part of Mayer's writing practice over the next few decades.

St. Marks Poetry Project

Like many other younger poets, Mayer found a home in the poetry community surrounding the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church. Mayer was well known for the workshops she taught there, ones that "have become renowned for the variety of textual approaches deployed, and for their emphasis on nonliterary (or not primarily literary) texts." She taught regularly from 1971 to 1974 and sporadically throughout the rest of the 70s.

Writers who attended or sat in on her workshops included Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, John Giorno, and Anne Waldman.

Mayer was elected director of The Poetry Project in 1980 and served until Eileen Myles took over in 1984. As director, Mayer retooled the marathon reading and worked to get more funding for The Project's programming, including a $10,000 donation from The Grateful Dead. Among other things, Mayer was in part responsible for the implementation of a lecture series and the Monday night reading series, both of which remain a part the Poetry Project's programming schedule today.

Editing

Mayer ran 0 to 9 magazine with Vito Acconci from 1967 to 1969 and published 6 issues full of content by artists including Robert Barry, Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, John Giorno, Dan Graham, Michael Heizer, Kenneth Koch, Sol LeWitt, Jackson Mac Low, Harry Mathews, Adrian Piper, Bern Porter, Yvonne Rainer, Jerome Rothenberg, Aram Saroyan, Robert Smithson, Alan Sondheim, Hannah Weiner, and Emmett Williams. 0 to 9 also had unfulfilled plans to publish a book by Adrian Piper.

From 1972 to 1973, Mayer co-edited the publication Unnatural Acts, a "collaborative writing experiment" that arose from a Poetry Project workshop. Only 2 issues of the magazine were published, though a 3rd — a postcard issue with work by visual artists — was planned.

From 1978 to 1984 Mayer co-edited United Artists books and magazine with her then-partner, Lewis Warsh. United Artists published some of the most significant books of Mayer's peers, in addition to several of her own volumes. In an interview with Susan Howe in the late 70s, Mayer spoke on the topic of self-publishing: "I think it’s great to publish one’s own work. I never felt any vacillating about that whole thing....It seems like a way to disseminate writing in a very efficient way. You can get it to all the people who you know are going to read it. There’s no fooling around. You can do it the way you want it done." United Artists remained an active press after Mayer and Warsh split in the mid-80s.

Private life

Mayer was in a relationship with poet Lewis Warsh with whom she had 3 children. Of her romantic life, Mayer wrote, "Left a beautiful anarchist lover of 10 years because he wanted no responsibility for children, I chose to have three with another, now living "alone" with them."

Mayer lives with her partner, poet Philip Good, in upstate New York. In 1994, Mayer suffered a temporarily debilitating stroke. While she has recovered, it altered her motor skills and continues to affect her writing process.

Mayer has corresponded extensively with many writers, including poet Clark Coolidge with whom she collaborated on The Cave, a project revolving around a trip the two of them took to Eldon's Cave in western Massachusetts. Mayer has also collaborated with poets Anne Waldman, Alice Notley, Lee Ann Brown, and Jen Karmin.

Recognition

Mayer received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (1995). She was also a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipient, a 2009 Creative Capital Awardee, and received a National Book Critics Circle nomination for 2016's Works and Days.

Writing

Mayer's record-keeping and use of stream-of-consciousness narrative are trademarks of her writing, though she is also known for her work with form and mythology. In addition to the influence of her textual-visual art and journal-keeping, Mayer's poetry is widely acknowledged as some of the 1st to speak accurately and honestly about the experience of motherhood.

Publications

Poetry

• Ceremony Latin (1964). New York: Angel Hair, 1964.
• Moving. New York: Angel Hair, 1971.
• The Basketball Article. New York: Angel Hair, 1975.
• Studying Hunger. New York: Adventures in Poetry / Berkeley, CA: Serendipity, 1975.
• Poetry. New York: Kulchur Foundation, 1976.
• Eruditio Ex Memoria. Lenox, MA: Angel Hair, 1977.
• The Golden Book of Words. Lenox, MA: Angel Hair, 1978.
• Midwinter Day. Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island / Netzahaulcoyotl Historical Society, 1982; New York: New Directions, 1982, 1999.
• Incidence Report Sonnets. New York: Archipelago, 1984.
• Mutual Aid. Mademoiselle de la Mole Press, 1985.
• Sonnets. New York: Tender Buttons, 1989.
• The Formal Field of Kissing: Translations, imitations, and epigrams. New York: Catchword Papers, 1990.
• The Desire of Mothers to Please Others in Letters. West Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press, 1994.
• Two Haloed Mourners: Poems. New York: Granary Books, 1998.
• Another Smashed Pinecone. New York: United Artists, 1998.
• Indigo Bunting. La Laguna, Tenerfie, Canary Islands, Spain: Zasterle, 2004.
• Scarlet Tanager. New York: New Directions, 2005.
• Poetry State Forest. New York: New Directions, 2008.
• Ethics of Sleep. New Orleans, LA: Trembling Pillow, 2011.
• The Helens of Troy, N.Y. New York: New Directions, 2012.

Novels

• Utopia. New York: United Artists, 1984.

Short fiction

• Story. New York: 0 to 9 Press, 1968.
• Proper Name, and other stories. New York: New Directions, 1996.

Non-fiction

• Memory (autobiography). Plainfield, VT: North Atlantic Books, 1975.

Collected editions

• A Bernadette Mayer Reader. New York: New Directions, 1992.
• Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The first books of Bernadette Mayer, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill of Barrytown, 2014.

Edited

• 0 to 9: The complete magazine, 1967-1969. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling, 2006.

Journals

• Studying Hunger Journals. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill at Barrytown, 2011.
• At Maureen's (with Greg Masters). New York: Crony Books, 2013.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

Bernadette Mayer reads "America, My Worst Poem"

Bernadette Mayer "Eve of Easter" on Public Access Poetry 50 4 26 1978

• New York School poets
• List of U.S. poets

References

• Smith, Dinitia. "Fresh Look At A Syntax Skewer". The New York Times. 
• Burt, Stephen. "Mother Tongues". Village Voice (New York, NY). 
• Corbett, William (1989). "Review: Nine Brief Reviews by William Corbett". Harvard Book Review (13/14): 27–28. ISSN 10806067. 
• Bendall, Molly (1993). "Review: [untitled]". The Antioch Review 51 (3): 466. ISSN 00035769. 
• "'The Art of Self-Indulgence'". The Washington Post. 
• Burnham, Emily (2008-06-07). "Words processing; UMaine's Poetry of the 1970s conference dissects a decade". Bangor Daily News (Maine). 

External links

Poems

• Bernadette Mayer b. 1945 at the Poetry Foundation
• Bernadette Mayer at PoemHunter (5 poems)
• Bernadette Mayer profile & 7 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• Thirteen poems by Bernadette Mayer
• Bernadette Mayer @ EPC (Electronic Poetry Center)

Prose

• Bernadette Mayer's writing experiments

Books

• Bernadette Mayer at Amazon.com
• Works by or about Bernadette Mayer in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Audio

• Bernadette Mayer at PennSound.
• Bernadette Mayer at YouTube

About

• "Authority file". http://errol.oclc.org/laf/n86-848883.html. Retrieved 2009-06-14. 
• Online Poetry Classroom profile
• Form's Life: An Exploration of the Works of Bernadette Mayer by Nada Gordon.