Remembering Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022)
Bernadette Mayer
Renowned and beloved poet Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022) passed away on November 22, 2022. Mayer focused her work on creating minute records of daily life, detailed snapshots of time enlivened through clear, expressive language.
In July 1971, she exposed a roll of 35mm film each day and kept a daily journal for the project Memory. The result was over 1,000 photographs and nearly six hours of recorded poetry. It was shown in an experimental art space and later compiled into a book. Then, in 1978, she wrote Midwinter Day, an epic poem charting the day of the winter solstice which gives "a plain introduction to modes of love and reason" by "prov[ing] the day like the dream has everything in it."
Following Midwinter, Mayer published Utopia in 1984. Published as "Utopian Copyright :)...all rights unreserved," the book received a copyright notice that began with "All rights unreserved under International & Pan-American no-copyright no-conventions..." It received praise attributed to such illustrious (if anachronistic) names as Sigmund Freud, whose blurb for Utopia read, "I wish I were still living to understand this book," and Emma Goldman, whose blurb read, "If this woman would stop writing Utopias, she might be a good worker for the cause."
Mayer's work was full of experiments in thinking and being across her many roles: as a mother, as a director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, as a small press and little magazine editor, as a teacher, and as one who continuously pushed the boundaries of understanding language and life while writing, "Let’s get on with our non-paying work as always."
Our deepest condolences to her family, to those who knew and loved her, and to the readers who have been touched deeply by her work.
NYPL’s Berg Collection of English and American Literature contains a selection of works by Mayer, along with photos, letters, and other correspondence with several of her contemporaries.
Recent Works
Milkweed Smithereens (2022)
Milkweed Smithereens gathers lively, wickedly smart, intimate, and indelible Bernadette Mayer poems: the volume ranges from brand-new nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from her Covid Diary and Second World of Nature to early poems and sonnets found in the attic or rooted out in the UC San Diego archive.
Works and Days (2016)
Part springtime journal, Works and Days meditates on the first wasps and chipmunks of the season, times’ passage, grackle hearts, and dandelions, while also collecting dozens of poems considering the Catholic Church, Sir Thomas Browne, “Go Away” welcome mats, books, floods (“never of dollar money”), the invention of words, local politics, friendships, property development, dogs, and Hesiod. Every page delights. As the poet herself notes: “My name is Bernadette Mayer, sometimes / I am at the head of my class.”
Scarlet Tanager (2005)
Comprised almost entirely of never-before-collected poems, Scarlet Tanager was Bernadette Mayer's first collection of new work in nearly a decade. Mayer, "one of the most original writers of her generation" (The Washington Post), has mixed together here delightful epigrams ("The Mammal Epigram": "Sexually / it's cute"), long-line free verse, and her astonishing sonnets. There are also curious translations of Mayer poems into joking, free-styling French, which are then re-translated back into English, landing somewhere extremely witty and quite some ways from the original. There is no one writing today who can touch Bernadette Mayer for sheer pleasure and throw-away brilliance.
Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.