The first Bernadette Mayer Feminist Reading Group that I was involved with was in the fall of 2017. Simone White, who was curating the workshops and Wednesday Night Reading Series at the Project, asked if I would like to facilitate a reading group. I had never done anything like that, and as I agreed to Simone’s invitation, I felt both honored and intimidated. I didn’t have to think hard to know that I wanted to focus on Bernadette’s writing, even though my relationship to her work at that time was more as something storied, a foundational part of the community I belonged to, and not as something that I had read extensively. In fact, when I had tried to read The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters in college (at the suggestion of my teacher, Em Card), I found it overwhelming. I had never experienced such abundance, or been offered such expansive permission, until I encountered these poems that push in order to make room for everything. It took me some years to find my way back.

Reading Bernadette’s work, both in that first reading group and in all the various formations and arrangements in which I’ve read her poems since then, has helped me to understand the sociality of poetry in ways that have changed how I read and how I think and how I write, and also how I attempt to build community, still working at the Project all these years later. I feel all that when I read her poems by myself, too. We called the first group “Could I Get Them To Be Me?” after something Bernadette had said at Naropa in 1978 about Memory. She was commenting on the invitation she was making with the piece, or the question she was asking, about what it would take to authentically share an experience, what it would mean if a self or a consciousness could be opened up in a way that allowed it to be someone else’s self or consciousness for a moment. It’s exciting to me because that transmission feels simultaneously exceptional, radical, while also acting as a reminder that this sort of porousness is happening in different ways all the time, we are always transforming and being transformed through our interactions with each other. I feel so grateful to be part of a community so filled with people who have passed through the portal Bernadette opened with her work, who have been transformed by being her, being with her.