on the move
Bernadette
Mayer Eating the Colors of a Lineup of
Words (Barrytown, New York: Station Hill, 2015)
Mayer’s work seemed so inexplicably mature
that I couldn’t have imagined that she was just a couple of years older. I also
did not know that she had begun publishing eleven years earlier, with Ceremony Latin (1962), which appeared
when she was just 17. This young woman’s voice was like no other at the time, a
poet with obviously a deep connection to Gertrude Stein, who, nonetheless, did
not imitate or sound like Stein. Far before the linguistic explorations of most of the language poets, Mayer,
collaborating with artist Vito Acconci, was exploring verbal sound experiments
such as the portion of Sin in the
Bleekers that appeared in her 1976 volume, Poetry:
Salaam my Salems on a
banker’s disturbance
Crass dots, a prelude for
daughters
In their
transparence—which is the secret.
Lay way, the markets in
drools of temptations.
This is the end of a
lender,
Who sent his miss. ……………
If I had no
idea whatsoever what it meant, it nonetheless sounded perfectly assured and
meaningful, as if every word belonged in the sequence in which it appeared.
Her Poetry,
in fact, opened my mind to a playful relation with language that freed words to
suggest their meanings as opposed to forcing meaning into words. At the same
time, Mayer seemed to be so knowledgeable, with her Catholic school education,
about traditional forms. As the new collected early works, just published by
Station Hill Press, reveals, she knew her Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, even the
Greeks. She could write a wicked sestina as in her “The Aeschyleans,” one of my
very favorite of her early poems:
These berries, with
their choices, come to earth
To scatter and confuse
the sainted warriors,
A part of crime’s
return to grace
And the innocence of
criminals which
Enervates us like the
coarser forms
Of truculence. Rude
labors are ordinary and still.
They speed the
haphazard. Slow manners till
Desires long buried on
the earth
Among the exigencies
of place and concurrent forms
Which frightened even
staid warriors.
May transfix the
movements of warriors. To grace
These corridors with
flowers is a chance for grace
As if ancient events
were surfeited and still.
…………………………..
If one
wanted further evidence of Mayer’s startling erudition, moreover, one need only
read her beautiful Eruditio Ex Memoria which
Mayer comments on her process of composition:
I didn’t want to carry
around my school notebooks anymore,
but I didn’t want to
throw them away either so I tore random
pages from them on which
I later based this book. I saved the
doodles too.
I reviewed that book in my only
substantial contribution to Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews’ L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, where I
described it as being a kind of abbreviated “anatomy,” the Roman comic genre of
Petronius’ Satyricon, a more modern
example of which is Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood.
Today, although I wouldn’t disavow what I then wrote, I might also describe the
work as a highly concentrated encyclopedic fiction, a work that in its brief
twenty-five pages in this new volume condenses knowledge into poetic
associations. The first two paragraphs demonstrate its effect:
I saw a doctor, a
doctor. It was Antonin Artaud. He was elected
to the Royal Academy,
no that was Chekhov. This is the Russian
Theater, it’s 1962 or
so, the moralist of the venial sin is here,
resigning over Gorky.
Doctor. “The Seagull” defends Zola and
Dreyfus, it’s the
Moscow Art Theater. Chekov is Godard. This is
what I learned at
school. This is what I thought: Artaud, Antonin.
Hemispheres become
loose in the country, there are new forms.
Stanislavsky, etc. Add
up a column of numbers, it comes to
William Carlos Williams
to me. What are the spiritual heights, she
said Just as Uncle Vanya looks like a dial, Paris
comes and goes,
prissy, lightfooted and
beautiful-looking, but, by and large, outside
forces come to the
surface. By the same token, we seem fully uneven,
without the bones and
stays. The homecoming: she opened and
closed her conversation
with adequacy. There’s a picture of a man
with a spring for a
body. There’s a picture of a woman dancing with
a leaf for a hand, her
head on a string, hanging forward. It’s Madam
Shaw. Relevant is
relevant, irrational knot, unsocial socialist, un-
pleasant and pleasant
Madam Shaw. Oh Shaw, polygammarian, the
candidate, there’s a
heart and a louse on the skunk.
In Mayer’s recreation of what appear to
be her school lessons, the doctor she visits or first conjures up is
understandably associated with the great dramatist and theater director,
Antonin Artaud, who spent much of his childhood and later life under the care
of doctors, suffering, early in his life, from meningitis, neuralgia, and
clinical depression, and, after years of visiting various sanatoriums, ended
his later life with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Correcting her purposely “associative
mistake,” Mayer quickly shifts to another great dramatic figure, Anton Chekov,
who actually was a medical doctor, who proclaimed “Medicine is my lawful wife,
literature is my mistress.” Many of Chekov’s plays, moreover, including Uncle Vanya—which Mayer mentions in the
second paragraph—were directed by another great modernist director (with
theories very different from Artaud’s theories of madness), Constantin
Stanislavski, with whom she begins her second paragraph, whose “method”
theories he brilliantly used to direct a revival of the previously failed
Chekhov play, The Seagull, himself
performing in the play as the writer Boris Trigorin. And, indeed, after growing
weary from directing and performing another important Russian playwright, Maxim
Gorky, Stanislavski did indeed take a leave from the Moscow Art Theater which
he and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko had created. Chekov, who died early of
tuberculosis, also had to seek the aid of several doctors, and died, so legend
has it, soon after one of them offered him a last glass of champagne.
Is it any wonder that these “figures,” if
listed in a column, might “add up,” as Mayer puts it, to William Carlos
Williams, who was yet another writer, medical doctor who was also major figure
of modernism?
The third major figure of this thumbtack
history of modernist theater, inevitably, is the great Irish dramatist George
Bernard Shaw, who, born in the mid-19th century, certainly came out
of the Victorian world of “bones and stays.”
Shaw himself married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, who refused to have sex
with him, the marriage with the “Madam Shaw” which Mayer mentions, accordingly,
never being consummated. The “irrational knot” which Mayer mentions is a
reference to Shaw’s novel The Irrational
Knot wherein he describes the failure of a marriage because of an upper
class wife’s inability to share her workman husband’s interests. And, indeed,
Shaw was a “unsocial socialist.” The reference to Shaw being “polygmammalian,”
is, of course, hinting at his famous play Pygmalion.
For all of her wonderfully complex experimental works, however—and there are many, many others among her early writings—one might find it hard to love Mayer’s work as much as I do if one sought merely playful language. For Mayer is nearly always in motion in her life and writing, as she expresses it in the long poem “Moving.’ Throughout her works she shifts not only in her literary approaches but in her expression of self, sexuality, political viewpoints, and relationships with the world about her. As she hints of this in “Moving” and later in another poem, restating the same words:
we’ve solved the problem, the problem is solved.
men are women, women are men. i’m
pregnant for a while you’re pregnant for a
while. “if someone doesnt change
into an animal, we wont be saved someone
must change into an animal so that we
can be saved” a man turns into a cat………
For this
reason, if for no other, Mayer is what I might lovingly describe as a “messy”
poet, an honest writer who is utterly unafraid of expressing her emotional
doubts, fears, and confusions in the very process of creating. Particularly in
her love poems, but also in many other works, Mayer interrupts her own writing,
asking herself rhetorical questions, berating her style, demonstrating her
angers and frustration—just, to use the cliché, “letting it all hang out.”
How can I write you about
deanimation, love
Deanimation-Love
Deanimation, Love—
My love
& yours
I am not on your shelf, you are not
on my shelf
But
I want you to be
Your subject
Subject to
The greatest love of all time—a
woman’s face with Nature’s
own hand painted
Forgive me now, I am putting you on
my shelf
The mantelpiece, the design, the
waiting for your call
…………………..
(“Deanimation Love”
from Poetry)
In poem
after poem, particularly in the last work of this volume, The Golden Book of Words, as she attempts to raise three children,
feed them with little money, and simply keep warm from the cold Massachusetts
winters, Mayer composes works that that reveal her everyday activities
intruding upon her more intense poetic expressions and thoughts.
…………………….
Full of animal crackers, I joke
with you
About buying a bra, I measure
myself
I have a 38-inch bust, as they used
to say
But with nipples excited by the
tape measure
It’s only 35, I guess this is not a
decorous poem
As Donne or Pope would have set it
all up
Fourteen hundred to eighteen
hundred A.D.
In the western world we’ve got
Where the work of women holds up
half the sky
And yet the desire to write tonight
Is borne, dare I say it, like a
seed
On the wind and so on, we were
talking to your mother
…………………
(“Easy Puddings”
from The Golden Book of Words)
Or, as in
the previous poem in that volume, “The Heart of the Hare,” she is unafraid
simply to list her daily duties for the week ahead:
Tomorrow’s Monday maybe we’ll do
some laundry
Clean clothes for one night in
New York
I’ve got to hardboil some eggs
for lunch on Tuesday
Pack a complete bag and stay
healthy
…………………..
In other
words, if you really want to read this often-rewarding poet, you also have to
deal with her as an everyday human being. If I seem to have inserted myself
into this review more than usual it because reading and talking about the poems
of Bernadette Mayer demands a very personal response. In Mayer’s work you must
be willing to follow her along the valleys in order to get to the mountaintops.
But oh how wonderful those moments of
utter linguistic freedom and revelation are, as in the absolutely magical and
joyously comic poem about a strange local family living near her in Lenox,
Massachusetts:
They come down on their
snowmobiles for the last time,
come down to meet the
car.
They’re shouting, “Hoo Hey! The
snow! Give them the snow!
Let them eat snow! Hey!
The snow!”
Looking like wild men &
women, two wild children & a
grandmother too, they’re
taking turns riding the
snowmobile, they’re
getting out.
Hoo! Hey! The snow! freaking out.
Everybody in town watches,
standing in groups by the
“Road Closed” sign.
Shouting back, “Take it easy! The
snow!
On Bashan Hill they’ve lived in a
cloud, watched. They’d had
plenty of split peas,
corn, Irish soda bread, fruitcake,
chocolate, pemmican. But
the main thing was—NO PLOW!
Day before at the Corners
Grocery, news got around. “They’re
Coming down from Bashan
Hill—never to return!”
The snow!
(“The End of
Human Reign on Bashan Hill”, from
The Golden Book of Words)
In just 39
lines, Mayer creates a narrative poem that reveals, through her presentation of
this wild family, the separateness, isolation, and inner vitality of the
community so completely that we might almost read it as a novel.
In such a constantly unstable world as
Mayer’s you never know what you might find, as in the simple nature poem,
“Instability (Weather)”
……………………………………..
I must get back to the
lilacs
So excited when I saw them
first blooming in the back next to the
apple tree
I nearly jumped for joy my
heart beats rapidly
Because they are late &
we are moving
Blossoms for Lewis &
Charlotte who’s here
The lilacs were so far away
I didnt get to them
But I wont tell, I’ll go
with a scissor tomorrow
The scissor I’ll hide in the
woods tonight
For some strange reason I’ll
never say
I’ll never have lived a more
exciting day
Even if one
can comprehend why the lateness of the lilacs blooming might give the narrator
some joy, what does the fact that family is moving have to do with the lilacs?
Why won’t she “tell” and from whom is she keeping this secret. Why didn’t she
“get to them” previously? And why has she hidden the scissors in the woods? In
Mayer’s hands, even the simple discovery of a lilac bush and the process of
cutting a few of its flowers to place in a vase becomes a magically ritualistic
act, as if the narrator, presumably Bernadette, were connected to nature with
forces that cannot be explained. And in the process of reading her poems, the
reader, too, is taken there, a place where he might never have discovered
without the poet’s very personal eye, voice, and hand to guide him.
Los Angeles, August 8, 2015
Reprinted as
“The Drama in the Everyday: Bernadette Mayer’s Early Poems” from Hyperallergic Weekend (August 15, 2015).
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