Nothing Is a Memory: Remembering Bernadette Mayer

Abstract

Nothing Is a MemoryRemembering Bernadette Mayer Daniel Poppick (bio) For her 1971 project Memory, Bernadette Mayer took a roll of film every day for the month of July and transcribed what it depicted. With Memory's monumental torrent of images and words from what appears to be a scrappily halcyon summer—Manhattan streets, Hudson Valley diners and forests, stray shots of Mayer herself and intimate, dimly lit gatherings of friends and lovers—the poet attempts to put everything down for a limited and arbitrary period of time. And yet the painstaking effort only underscores how much cannot be included. "It's astonishing to me that there is so much in Memory, yet so much is left out: emotions, thoughts, [End Page 152] sex, the relationship between poetry and light, storytelling, walking, and voyaging to name a few," she wrote in 2019. (The photographs were exhibited in 1972 by the gallerist Holly Solomon alongside a six-hour looped recording of Mayer reading the accompanying poem, but the text and images were not available together in a book until 2020.) Mayer knew as well as any poet of her generation that there isn't enough time within a single life to give a full account of one's memory, much less to record it. You can try in every medium imaginable—language, images, sound, whatever. It can't be done. Memory is circumscribed, but language cannot keep up with it. Mayer tried anyway, and in her thrilling snapshots of the present in the instant it slipped into the past, she helped push poetry forward into places it had never been before. This paradox is one of several that defined Mayer, who passed away late last year. Her work is possessed of a spirit of ceaseless creative reinvention, anarchic sexuality, and anticapitalist fervor, but it is also preoccupied with the classics and traditional form. She was a rigorous lyric thinker and autodidact who committed her life to the idea that poetry was an egalitarian art, that it could and should be taken up by anyone. As a committed avant-gardist, she was always ahead of her time, but she never stopped experimenting with new ways of capturing memory. Halfway through Milkweed Smithereens, the last book that she saw to publication, Mayer offers a window into her writing processes, something she artfully recapitulated again and again throughout her life: "the idea that writing is easy comes from the frank o'hara method. but it is in fact easy, especially if you don't try to say more than you are thinking, to say other than what you're thinking, for instance you might be trying to say what somebody else is thinking." The Frank O'Hara method, as she calls it—the flaneurish, chatty style that O'Hara made his own in the 1950s, in which poetry flows as naturally as a babbling stream through city strolls, encounters with art, and flirty cocktail conversation—looks simple enough. But Mayer's poems, like O'Hara's, are something else: as gorgeous, sad, [End Page 153] elated, horny, distracted, coy, angry, kinetic, and complex as people. How did something as difficult as life emerge from something as easy as living? Writing might in fact be easy. But it's also impossible to capture the entirety of what you are thinking, feeling, and doing in words. Mayer's magic trick was to make it look like she could, even as she dramatized this impossibility. Like O'Hara, Mayer was a threshold poet, writing between aesthetic realms. In the late 1960s and '70s, when she first emerged onto New York's creatively molten downtown scene, she was an interlocutor with both the rowdy, anti-hierarchical energy of the New York School's second generation and the intellectual rigor of a nascent conceptual art and poetics emerging in real time. She co-founded and edited the mimeographed magazine 0 to 9 with her brother-in-law, the artist Vito Acconci, and her galvanizing workshops at the St. Mark's Poetry Project were attended by Charles Bernstein, Hannah Weiner, Bruce Andrews, and others who in short time would come to form Language poetry. In her books, Mayer swings...