The Poetry Project

Laynie Browne

When I had the good fortune of meeting Bernadette Mayer in the early 90s in NYC, I was already a devoted reader of her work. An instant recognition happened in reading—which was confirmed exponentially upon meeting—that I had found the writer who would make everything possible.

Her work generates a powerfully contagious and collaborative ethos. You can find it in her legendary writing experiments, throughout her brilliant, boisterous poems—simultaneously erotic and irreverent, physical and metaphysical—and even in her titles, like Memory, Ethics of Sleep, and Poetry State Forest—which suggest we might all do well to look again, collectively, at anything we think we know. Bernadette’s capacity to welcome the unknown, every aspiring poet, her voracious interest in everyone and everything—is tremendously inspiring. From her I learned that letters have colors, that Troy, NY is full of Helens, that all is fascination: the brain, the garden, the world of dreams, and that the work of the quotidian is equal to, or may exceed the appeal of extroverted outer lives.

Always a generous correspondent, her letters, typed on goldenrod paper, stitched distances between meetings and followed different trajectories than phone calls. In one, I asked Bernadette if she could tell me about a method of composition in which she’d said that her writing was “already written”:

“when I say something has been written already & i just trace it, that’s how it seems. it’s already in my mind, already done. the way we use the word ‘done’ is misleading. As we know things don’t have a beginning, middle or end. all i’m saying is the whole thing’s there in my mind, it’s already there, even though it can’t be seen (?)”

We, the lucky readers of her work, can return to her tracery anew, since—thanks to Bernadette—we see. She may remain “unseen”—but I highly doubt it. I am counting on ethereal appearances at St. Mark’s, as she was known to see in her days as director, as well as cameos in dreams, and her gaze across every page I read and write—meaning to say that those who love Bernadette might agree—that the word “done” is misleading, and that there is no “beginning, middle or end” to those poems and those lives which encourage the most intimate and profound investigations, our own tracery of the unseen.

Remembrances: Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022)

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