The Poetry Project

Peter Gizzi

Bernadette Mayer Forever

I loved Bernadette Mayer, loved all the times I got to spend with her, and often with Phil, and with one or all of her children, Marie, Max, and Sophie. They threw the very best midsummer cookouts every year. Such good times with everyone present, including many years back, my brothers, Michael and Tom. The vibe was open and fun. My favorite thing was to make her laugh. She had an unforgettable laugh. It was infectious and mirthfully conspiratorial. I first heard Bernadette’s laugh in the mid-80s at 172 East 4th St. I was editing the journal o•blēk and very much wanted to publish her. During one of my earliest conversations with her, or maybe it was even our first, she asked me what losing my father at 12 meant to me, or what it was to me in my life. I instantly liked her. It was, finally, a real question, intense but also, thankfully, real. I knew parts of her story from her work and that she had experienced hard losses and was orphaned as a young teen. We both hated the word “trauma,” and agreed loss at an early age allowed for a premature introduction to the sublime. We bonded over that. Also, over the fact I grew up near Lenox, MA (where she wrote some of her major works) and, like her, was a deep fan of Hawthorne and Melville. I could hear how her intelligent and sympathetic love of their work had affected her phenomenal syntax, which, I always felt, performs a radical transcendental porousness of personhood. Like the transcendentalists, she could find a unity in all things and a unity beyond conventional logic. In her epical works she built a world and developed an inspired grammar and syntax to connect “everything,” and yet the scale was always remarkably human. For me, to build the capacious human emotional reality manifest in these works, the urgency to connect “everything,” to create a continuous syntactical present, is a durable magic, and perhaps, in part, comes from early loss and the native understanding of irrevocability. Her work is heroic to me. She has delivered a libertine vision of the home world, and it’s deep, filled with mundanity, children, landlords, incident reports, friends, laundry, bills, food, and lovers. Some of her books are poetry and some are prose, some run to hundreds of pages, and some have been art installations. Her poetry is untamed, courageous, word-loving, thought-bending, anarchic, scientific, plaintive, funny, generous, honest, and fearless. She wrote in so many registers and forms. I love her work in all its moods just as much as I loved her.

1/1/23

Remembrances: Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022)

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