« In Which We Know Bernadette Mayer In The Most Astonishing Bourgeois Way »

photo by lawrence schwartzwald

My South African Map-Kerchief

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Twenty years after its publication, A Bernadette Mayer Reader still feels like it was written yesterday. Mayer's austere, hilarious sonnets punctuate her first true collection of works from the previous decades, buffering the text like cars streaming down the highway in the wrong direction.

INCANDESCENT WAR POEM SONNET

Even before I saw the chambered nautilus
I wanted to sail not in the us navy
Tonight I'm waiting for you, your letter
At the same time his letter, the view of you
By him and then by me in the park, no rhymes
I saw you, this is in prose, no it's not
Sitting with the molluscs & anemones in an
Empty autumn enterprise baby you look pretty
With your long eventual hair, is love king?
What's this? A sonnet? Love's a babe we know that
I'm coming up, I'm coming, Shakespeare only stuck
To one subject but I'll mention nobody said
You have to get young Americans some ice cream
In the artificial light in which she woke

Her cynicism comes across as deeply original for its time. Her attitude puts the poet beyond the jargon that surrounded or objectified her in the world, showing it to be an external, eternal feature, not a contemporary one. Repetition played a major role, because it was another way of ridiculing old constructs in poetry she was focused on tearing down.

In her Catullus translations, Mayer really let loose. An anger percolates through them, sustained by the bawdy lyricism of the original. Here she rewrites the male perspective satirically, and leaving the jokes that suit her points. In so doing, she invests his floaty style with an opposite, but equally subversive meaning. "She translates and imitates Latin and Greek poets as only a woman of the 1990s could," her friend Jackson Mac Low wrote of her oeuvre. This statement feels as true today as it was at the time it was made.

HENDECASYLLABLES ON CATULLUS #3

You have the balls to say you will be with me
but you hardly ever are, then you say you're scared
of your parents' opinion, they pay your rent
I wouldn't mind that if they didn't think I
was a whore ridden with Aids disease & worse things
but I am I and my little dog knows me
in the most astonishingly bourgeois way
I even pay my self-employment tax now
and put leftovers into expensive tinfoil
to be used in imaginable tomorrows
therefore I protest my bad reputation
but I do wander all night in my vision

In the early 1980s, Mayer spent her days as the director of St. Marks Poetry Project. She told Adam Fitzgerald a few years ago, "It was a great scene in the East Village. You could stand on the corner and decide to start a magazine and collect all the poems, and someone would have a mimeograph machine, and you could have a magazine that night. It was great to have all the poets within walking distance, I mean so many of them. Mimeograph is print on paper, you put ink on the machine. We bought them. They were easy to get a hold of. They were $200. You could immediately make a magazine anytime you wanted."

The New School poets floated on the periphery then; from this vantage poetry was no less a boys club than before, but they could not help but recognize Mayer's prodigious talent. Her poems were in many cases better than her peers, and she had to know it.

"You wear green glitter on your shirt instead of a tie, that’s how I recognize you as you" she says in "Watching the Complex Train Track Changes," which she dedicates "To Men." They are the object of fascination and understanding for Mayer, but in the end they remain alien to her.

SONNET

A little tiny poem
leaves us all alone

now that you're not here
dont ever come home

my cruelty only comes
from death's elaborate tombs

i talked to all your friends
talked to them one by one

they all agreed you are
a handsome child of nature

if so come here
as quickly as you can

if not I will unbraid
all the poems you said you made

There are two distinct movements in The Bernadette Mayer Reader, one of them a knowing and intellectual perspective that codifies past misdeeds and memories as part of a larger fabric. There is also a movement towards disillusionment, one that casts doubt on those who surround her. This second voice remains somber, less inflected. The last poems in A Bernadette Mayer Reader almost shrink into themselves, taking a step back from the larger, idealistic preoccupations of youth.

with charles bernstein, photo by jacob burckhardt MARIE YOU MUST MEET CRISTINA AT THE MUSIC SCHOOL TOMORROW AND NOT AT HER HOME

for Fanny Howe

See the way the water chills the glass is not a story
written as fast as is said you should see the moon standing
out in front of the animals who just walked in onto the
ledges of the ... no

They sit still as the squirrel paws to its mouth making
a sound of speaking after coming into the house, some of
the animals we see do not exist as

We drink warm water in the living room & a tracing is
made on our faces of the singing of the low & high notes
of all the failings of two dimensions like a chair that
lacks confidence to seat you at a concert of three kinds
of music summing up the work of the century with big bands
in the middle

Of the structure of water we are waiting in the wings in
& I push into but you are too big or dead to fall
& you pick me up & carry me forward like some kinds of
sex and on my head

I am wearing my South African map-kerchief & the one
animal who chooses to move or attack is a wild snake whose
fangs we disconnect from the flesh of a person & then
the young women

Get together to put on the long right-handed glove that
carries a string for diving so when the descent from the
church's stainless steel disc set up as a decimated and
slanted pool platform is made, the string will still be
seen as the diver disappears

Into the part where you can finally see the non-sacred room
or school as a girl by the side of the underwater cameras.

It's good to swim in a church in a partial ellipse of its old
pool destroyed by what is built to interrupt its flors
& now we are gone just like many have houses to sleep in
with doors

You can find the website of The Poetry Project here.

"Out of My Mind" - Wiretree (mp3)

"So Bold" - Wiretree (mp3)

with anne waldman