for Bernadette Mayer
One of the many questions Bernadette returns to again and again in her life and work, in her works and days, in late night phone calls is: “Can poetry change the world?"
One way Bernadette changes the world is by making clear roadmaps to her own discoveries in the laboratory of poetry and language. Her list of experiments, written with the students she taught at The Poetry Project, offers an invitation to magnify the arcing fields of reading, thinking and writing together for anyone who wants to try their hand at poetry or its expansions. (Over half of my first book Polyverse is in direct response to these Experiments.)
I hear her saying in my mind: “Read the Steins! Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Gertrude Stein.” This triumvirate of names mirrors her practice of always reading science, philosophy, literature, while also absorbing pop culture. When she couldn’t read herself when she was recovering from her cerebral hemorrhage in the mid 90s, friends gathered around to read classics aloud in a circle, with always a break in the middle to watch The Simpsons.
I open at random to a line from “Geology Sky of Geology Night” and find:
“I’m in love with the great attractor, my dog hector.”
One of the biggest events of the week for Bernadette was the advent of the arrival of the Tuesday edition of The New York Times because of the Science section. Bernadette was the first poet who impressed upon me that a poet needs to study all things, all disciplines, beginning with the names of the plants, stars and planets, the natural world, the multiverse. The Encyclopedia Britannica says the “Great Attractor” is “a proposed concentration of mass that influences the movement of many galaxies including the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies.”
And her dear dog Hector suggests her love of ancient Greek and Latin poetry.
The wonderful caesural comma, those wonderful “or” sounds!
Bernadette is one of the great loves of my life.
She is my, and our, Great Attractor.
We met in the Summer of 1985 after I read Midwinter Day by way of C.D. Wright’s course on the long poem, so during my year off between Junior and Senior years of college I made a pilgrimage to Naropa to find Bernadette. She had just turned 40 that May 12th, and she was traveling with her 8 year old daughter Sophia. I was 21.
I keep hearing Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—.” She certainly had her share of great pain, and needed to invent large and expansive forms to live. And I keep returning to the “forms” of collaboration where we simply wrote together every other line, being present with each other and with the words arising.
“Formal” as in when I half proudly, half shyly showed her some writing I had done, Bernadette said, “Great, now you need to find a form.” Over the years with her, I’ve grown into fully understanding the nature of generative form, and the importance of breaking forms open so that the pleasurable music of thinking can fold down out of the wall. She continues to help me go into and increase interior space and make it exterior.
Bernadette made deeply personal and intellectual poetry of handmade mutual aid, of time and attention as large as any reacher of the cosmos, a culture worker of deepest love. She created an intergenerational transmission and recognized others as equal despite being on different points in their trajectory.
Can poetry change the world?
Yes, from the bottom up, transforming the materials swirling around us. Yes, like the life force of one of her favorite flowers, the amaryllis which blooms outrageously in December given time and space erupting like the lava flow from the Canary Island volcanoes she so loved to watch on CNN during the last year of her life. Like the Antarctic explorer narratives that gave her material to write some of her most personal and exploratory works.
I do especially send love to Bernadette’s family: Marie, Sophia, and Max Warsh, Alyssa Gorelick, her beloved granddaughters, Veera and Zola, and her devoted partner Philip Good and thank them for sharing her with all of us and taking care of her so lovingly, and I send wishes for our continuing journeys together.
Here is a phrase from a recent Laynie Browne letter to me that I think sums up what I am trying to say about Bernadette, and can bear to end with (for now):
“So what will we say to amplify her work for the world now and later. The first thing that comes to mind is love. Not simply, because love is never simple and yet I think I can say clearly now that love is always the impetus even when irreverent or angry or ludicrous what is underneath is always love and reaction that when it is not there, when humans ignore our world or ignore the presence of another person as human, as important, what happens in the poems is a complaint which urges a return to love.”
In Gratitude and Love,
Lee Ann Brown