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Bernadette Mayer

1945–2022
Tight-cropped headshot of poet Bernadette Mayer.
Max Warsh

An avant-garde writer associated with the New York School of poets, Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, and has spent most of her life in New York City. Her collections of poetry include Midwinter Day (1982, 1999), A Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992), The Desire of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994), Another Smashed Pinecone (1998), Poetry State Forest (2008), and Works and Days (2016), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Known for her innovative use of language, Mayer first won critical acclaim for the exhibit Memory, which combined photography and narration. Mayer took one roll of film shot each day during July 1971, arranging the photographs and text in what Village Voice critic A.D. Coleman described as “a unique and deeply exciting document.”

Mayer’s poetry often challenges poetic conventions by experimenting with form and stream-of-consciousness; readers have compared her to Gertrude Stein, Dadaist writers, and James Joyce. Poet Fanny Howe commented in the American Poetry Review on Midwinter Day, a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts: “In a language made up of idiom and lyricism, Mayer cancels the boundaries between prose and poetry, ... Her search for patterns woven out of small actions confirms the notion that seeing what is is a radical human gesture.”

The Desire of Mothers to Please Others in Letters consists of prose poems Mayer wrote during her third pregnancy. She also combined poetry and prose in Proper Name and Other Stories (1996). Reviewing that collection in the Lambda Book Report, Susan Landers noted Mayer’s “Steinesque syntactical play, her meta-narrative maneuvers à la Barth or Borges, and a language poet’s interest in language.”

Ange Mlinko’s review of Two Haloed Mourners (1998) in the Poetry Project Newsletter describes its structure: “The book starts out dense, vagrant, proceeding on a combination of automatic writing and methodical structural repetitions. It picks up speed, changes gears from poetry to prose and back again, tries out a sestina where both beginning and ending words recur. ... Then something explodes midway through the book, as though all this formal experimentation was the rumbling and smoldering of Mt. Saint Helens erupting over the circumstances of Bernadette Mayer’s move back to the Lower East Side from New Hampshire, where what was menace in the air of rural America is met head-on in the New York of Reagan and Wall Street.”

Bernadette Mayer has worked as an editor and teacher. She edited the journal 0 TO 9 with artist Vito Acconci and established United Artists press with the poet Lewis Warsh. United Artists Press, under Mayer and Warsh, published a number of influential writers, including Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, James Schuyler, and Alice Notley. Mayer has taught at the New School for Social Research and The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City. In 2015 she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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Bibliography

  • Story, 0 to 9 Press (New York, NY), 1968.
  • Moving, Angel Hair (New York, NY), 1971.
  • (With Anne Waldman) The Basketball Article, Angel Hair (New York, NY), 1975.
  • Ceremony Latin (1964), Angel Hair (New York, NY), 1975.
  • Memory (performance art, exhibited in New York, NY, 1972), North Atlantic (Plainville, VT), 1975.
  • Studying Hunger, Serendipity Books (Berkeley, CA), 1976.
  • Poetry, Kulchur Foundation (New York, NY), 1976.
  • Erudition ex Memoria, Angel Hair (Lenox, MA), 1977.
  • The Golden Book of Words, Angel Hair (Lenox, MA), 1978.
  • Midwinter Day, Turtle Island Foundation (Berkeley, CA), 1982, reprinted, New Directions (New York, NY), 1999.
  • Incidents Reports Sonnets, Archipelago (New York, NY), 1984.
  • Utopia, United Artists Books (New York, NY), 1984.
  • Mutual Aid, Mademoiselle de la Mole Press (New York, NY), 1985.
  • Sonnets, Tender Buttons (New York, NY), 1989.
  • (With Dale Worsley) The Art of Science Writing, Teachers & Writers (New York, NY), 1989.
  • The Formal Field of Kissing, Catchword Papers (New York, NY), 1990.
  • A Bernadette Mayer Reader, New Directions (New York, NY), 1992.
  • The Desire of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, Hard Press (Stockbridge, MA), 1994.
  • Proper Name and Other Stories, New Directions (New York, NY), 1996.
  • Another Smashed Pinecone, United Artists Books (New York, NY), 1998.
  • Two Haloed Mourners, Granary Books (New York, NY), 1998.

Contributor to anthologies, including Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro, Random House, 1970; Another World, edited by Anne Waldman, Bobbs- Merrill, 1971; Young American Poets 2, edited by Paul Carroll, Follett, 1972; Individuals, edited by Alan Sondheim, Dutton, 1975; None of the Above, edited by Michael Lally, Crossing Press, 1976; and A Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, edited by Michael Palmer, North Atlantic, 1983. Contributor of poetry to Ice, Tzarad, 0 to 9, Lines, and other publications. The Bernadette Mayer Papers (1958-1996) are held at the University of California, San Diego's Mandeville Special Collections Library.