![]() For its modernism, Mayer’s work recalls Stein and its slow-lightning apprehension of grammar as the vehicle for human existence but it also recalls Hawthorne and Melville, stubborn American spirits who turned the seemingly “provincial” scope of their scrupulous observations into that stranger, larger fabric: what Montaigne and Emerson meant by “Experience.” Luckily, I had found a poet whose definition of “daily life” pretty much contained everything I had come to see as present in traditional poetry, and a good deal I found missing-from the Catullus she first studied in her Catholic School Latin class to nature poetry, from sexual anecdotes to surreal political diatribes, from “Walmart epigrams” to Whitmanian catalogues that celebrated a few hundred distinct American species of birds, trees and plants (creatures mostly indigenous to the Northeastern world in which she’s spent so much most of her adult life). Whether in her book-length hybrids of prose and poetry, her raunchy, gallant, sonnets or tender epistolary poems, Mayer’s signature is to recreate consciousness on the page, honoring always the simultaneity and enormity of daily life. Something I know is too mysterious (thankfully) to quite pinpoint, being as slippery and finicky as it is, but there it was: dry-witted, ribald, obsessive with diaphanous shifts in diction and music, quaintly domestic, fully eroticized. ![]() The work gripped me, as a poet, formally and technically-oh so this too was possible, huh? What amazed me even more than her crazed, tireless innovation was Mayer’s voice. Invariably, I turned to the Bernadette Mayer Reader to encounter a wide range of “experimental” work from many of her previous, out-of-print volumes (many of which will soon be republished: Studying Hunger Journals from Station Hill Press,Eruditio Ex Memoria from Monk Books, Sonnets from Tender Buttons Press). Who was this astonishingly original, fresh, female, Classical, and raw voice in American poetry? How has this work been such a well-kept secret, even though she’s been published by New Directions for over twenty years, regularly anthologized as a key second-generation New York School Poet, and a chief influence on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry? When my close friend Allison Power showed me Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets, I remember doing a nosedive tailspin. And Bernadette Mayer is always thinking.
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