As a first-time reader of Bernadette Mayer, I quickly began to wonder exactly what it was that made me keep reading Poetry State Forest (New Directions, 2008). I divided the subject matter of the poems into some general categories: Food, Weather, Poetry, Politics, Scrabble Words and Nonsense. Not that the poems can be divided so easily, they glide and morph and leap, taking you for a ride.
The book truly begins to cohere with the long (5.5 pages) prose section devoid of capitalization “40-60,” in which Mayer’s persona begins to truly take shape, giving the reader a perspective to latch on to, a lens through which to view the rest of the book. This prose section divulges the stroke she had at 49, debilitating her motor skills & affecting the way she writes. “as a result of the stroke, i am not balanced - i topple & fall easily. if you study how humans walk, it’s by stopping themselves from falling that a step is taken. i write unbalanced poetry, i cannot balance my checkbook, nor do i have one.”
This is pretty exemplary of Mayer’s writing style and persona. Autobiographical minutiae mixed with tangential “fun facts,” overridden by blatant disregard for grammar. The quick interspersing & neck-snapping changes of topic give her writing a careless feeling of whim - though I don’t think it’s fair to assume that the work is as careless as it seems. In the context of the rest of the book it comes to appear expertly calculated - we’ve become familiar with the major characters, locales and obsessions (hating on GWBush, for one) of her life. It also makes the reader read into the silly non-sequiturs as perhaps affectations of a mind altered by stroke or even amicable senility - an intentional locating of persona. The total effect is the accumulation of the everyday mundane, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. The end of the book was in large part ruined for me by a section entitled “Old Notebook.” Until then, I was enjoying Mayer’s narrative leaps and embedded social commentary - totally along for the ride. “Old Notebook” (which, by the way, is 20+ pages long) is an actual old notebook (or an amazingly accurate replica of one) reprinted, I don’t know, for the fun of it? Accumulation of everyday minutiae is one thing, subjecting your reader to a barrage without filter - of favorite scrabble words, lists of unpaid bills, disconnected slogans, half-poems, story summaries and bizarre linguistic exercises (to name just a few) is torturous and laughs in the reader’s face - which I suspect is the point. I kept reading hoping something was going to come of all this unmitigated fiddlefaddle, but alas, it was all for naught. About ten pages in I couldn’t resist scrawling “fuck you Bernadette Mayer” in the margin.
There is definitely a diaristic feeling to the book as a whole; a feeling even outside of “Old Notebook” that these words were scribbled down spontaneously. Nada Gordon says in her thesis on Mayer, “The journal form permits the integration of the process of writing into everyday life, using daily experience as the stuff of the writing, but it also permits the inclusion of otherwise ineffable material, and a way out of a repressive world.” Mayer is undoubtedly writing counter-culture simply by virtue of the nontraditional schematics of her writing. The persistent associative leaps and surrealistic flourishes contribute to the feeling of spontaneity. While much can be said for Mayer’s genuine exuberance, shining even through patches of sulky petulance, it doesn’t work when her poems come off so cute as to become precious. This is a good example of a poem that doesn’t work: “Whistle Stop Sleeper”
intermittent incipient nasturtium-snapdragons
climb the fence to the field, knowing we interfere
with their anti-warfare stances as they tumble
like downed trees or alpacas to the green ground
i wish i was an elephant, what would be behind me?
awful coaches or yellow couches tumble too, dusty
all the while like scimitars to regal turrets
ignore the pauses; those caesurae are haughty
my chin’s bleeding, what’s new? who’s late?
i’ll meet you on the other side, I’ll bring
her or him, a blue heron, are you an owl?
fearless? insouciant as an exotic love flower?
have you read The Conquest of Happiness? when?
i just said that to lengthen the line; so there
wish you were here you treelike human or short
imagination’s leaf, soon there’ll be a storm
While I appreciate the irreverence towards politics and “academic” poetry (the haughty caesurae, the spite evident in “i just said that to lengthen the line”), this poem just doesn’t do it for me, despite its hyperactive energy. It’s cute & mildly entertaining but ultimately pointless because it completely lacks an emotional register. Here’s one poem I think works really well, part of a section in which Mayer wrote the bulk of the sonnet at noon and the couplet at midnight every day for a month: “December 23″
Gloomy, unnaturally warmly, still tenebrous
The radiant, invisible dreaming universe,
A year of flowers, see how easy it is
to be a poet, you can say anything
Naming books off the shelf - you have to have
elves and books and leaves and a typewriter
and the lacrymals, once I bought a bookcase
that collapsed when I put books on it
I brought it back, the guy said “you didn’t
put books on it, did you?” This story
has a morose moral: books are insulation
The lights went out here dude
Cars thoughtlessly illuminating us
Same irreverence towards academia, but this time there’s something to latch on to (it happens to be a narrative thread, which I don’t believe it always need be) and though the final couplet is disconnected, it works once you know the constraint she’s using.
The diary form gives Mayer the leeway to play with language and to make it utterly her own, and it normalizes the process of writing as something all-inclusive, something to be done for any reason or no particular reason at all - which is where it begins to border on self-indulgence. It is ultimately an egalitarian form of writing - Mayer is immediately accessible and enjoyable (although I admittedly spent a good portion of the book trying to figure out what the text was hiding and how to unlock it) even if you don’t want to get into close-reading the syntax, her work implies that anyone can (and should) do this. In her words, “But shit man, I don’t know anything, do you?” (”December 31″ sonnet).
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