#bernadette mayer
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mary oliver, from october
rm, everythingoes (trans. doolsetbangtan)
fyodor dostoyevsky, from the brothers karamazov
yumi sakugawa (source)
ocean vuong, from on earth we're briefly gorgeous
sylvia plath, from the bell jar
bernadette mayer, from the way to keep going in antarctica
ada limón, from dead stars
rainer maria rilke, from letters to a young poet
mary oliver, from moments
#to live! to live! to live !!!!!!!!#web weaving#parallels#mary oliver#rm#kim namjoon#bts#fyodor dostoyevsky#yumi sakugawa#ocean vuong#sylvia plath#bernadette mayer#ada limón#rainer maria rilke#did i do it right#mine#words#ummmm#on living#because it's a monday again and my heart feels heavy with grief and all the time i feel tired and lost and untethered but still#my heart is full of hope and it will live forever in me i think i will never let go of it no matter the weight of living
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Notebooks 1951-1959 by Albert Camus // The Knight of the Flowers (detail) by Georges Rochegrosse // The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica by Bernadette Mayer // Little Weirds by Jenny Slate // Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre // The Fairy Glen by Steve Gill // The Carrying by Ada Limón // All the Gay Saints by Kayleb Rae Candrilli // Mirrors X by Nikki Giovanni // The Poet by Reynier Llanes // The Wanderings of Oisin by W.B Yeats // Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke // Letter to Gustave Flaubert X by George Sand // When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen // Waterlilies by Claude Monet
#w#tenderness#web weaving#albert camus#bernadette mayer#jenny slate#jean paul sartre#ada limon#nikki giovanni#wb yeats#rainer maria rilke#george sand#chen chen#claude monet#poetry#art
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RIP Bernadette Mayer - 1945-2022
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Gerard Malanga (photograph), Photo-booth portraits of Bernadette Mayer, 1969 [© Gerard Malanga]
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To Sophia, BY BERNADETTE MAYER
Now finally I've gotten to the bottom of it
I've got a few minutes left to tell the story of it
I gently wake myself up every day in the same delicate kind of dream's moment
Doesn't everybody wake up sometime to say
Don't bother me again just yet and how did I wind up here
I know it's not poetry to say so but how
Did I wind up having to move into another room to write another book
And while moving everything to have to study all the old things I've kept, endless negatives and slides held up to the light with friends and trees and families on them
So many papers and even some checks, old tapes with another voice of mine
Exhaustion's neighbor memory keeps telling me what I used to think then I still think
Now nostalgia for a tree makes me dally at the identifying window
I'm donating to you, younger daughter, I'm one or was one
You need to sleep alone
Away from the exotic noisy sleep of groaning parents
Who don't even know what they do or say in their sleep
You need to drink thought more privately
And not awaken every night in the same energetic need
To be comforted and nursed like a baby
Sophia you can have my old dark room of wars
I'm moving my desk to Main Street to work under the lights
Watch out for the rising moon, the looming eastern stars
Let's exchange the awful peace of our nights
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hold onto hope
Anne Lamott, "Bird by Bird" // Sachiho Ikeda, "The Things Look Like Moving" // Steven Outram, "The Direction" // Paramore, "26" // Eric Sloane, "Dawn" // Erin Hanson, "Wildflower Dawn" // Bernadette Mayer, "The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica"
#it was a 26 kinda night tonight. bc fr hold onto hope if you got it#webweaving#art#poetry#paramore#anne lamott#bernadette mayer#not tagging them all u get the gist ❤️#its about keeping hope!!! waiting for dawn!!!!!
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Bernadette Mayer, Memory (detail), 1971, approx. 1,100 wall-mounted C-prints, dimensions variable.
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bernadette mayer
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Nothing outside can cure you but everything's outside
*
from “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica” by Bernadette Mayer,
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Being so densely woven into history like this can have a calcifying effect on a poet and their work, particularly if they become well known. But Mayer never really did cross over into what we might call the mainstream, although in the last decade or so the reissue of her earlier work has helped to bring her astonishing oeuvre into clearer focus. Mostly, though, it's true that she abided by the advice she gave to her students, quoted a lot in the period after her death, to 'work your ass off to change the language, and never get famous'. She was committed to the practice of writing and to the dissemination of poetry to people who wanted to read it. What she did get - or, rather, what her work got - was known and loved, passed between teachers, students, friends, and lovers, often via the facsimiles of her books available for free online. This was certainly how I found her work, a PDF of an old library book sent to me by a friend, with someone else's notes and doodles still faintly visible in the margins. I'm thinking here, too, of how many people I know or know of in different places who have made a habit of gathering together on Midwinter Day to read "Midwinter Day" (1978) from start to finish, to move through that formally extraordinary - sometimes formally frustrating - document of one ordinary day together.
Helen Charman, from her essay “On Berndatte Mayer | A Celebration”, published in Poetry Review, Spring 2023
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Katarzyna Włodkiewicz ::: [Guillaume Gris]
* * * * *
Failures in Infinitives
BY BERNADETTE MAYER
why am i doing this? Failure
to keep my work in order so as
to be able to find things
to paint the house
to earn enough money to live on
to reorganize the house so as
to be able to paint the house &
to be able to find things and
earn enough money so as
to be able to put books together
to publish works and books
to have time
to answer mail & phone calls
to wash the windows
to make the kitchen better to work in
to have the money to buy a simple radio
to listen to while working in the kitchen
to know enough to do grownups work in the world
to transcend my attitude
to an enforced poverty
to be able to expect my checks
to arrive on time in the mail
to not always expect that they will not
to forget my mother's attitudes on humility or
to continue
to assume them without suffering
to forget how my mother taunted my father
about money, my sister about i cant say it
failure to forget mother and father enough
to be older, to forget them
to forget my obsessive uncle
to remember them some other way
to remember their bigotry accurately
to cease to dream about lions which always is
to dream about them, I put my hand in the lion's mouth
to assuage its anger, this is not a failure
to notice that's how they were; failure
to repot the plants
to be neat
to create & maintain clear surfaces
to let a couch or a chair be a place for sitting down
and not a table
to let a table be a place for eating & not a desk
to listen to more popular music
to learn the lyrics
to not need money so as
to be able to write all the time
to not have to pay rent, con ed or telephone bills
to forget parents' and uncle's early deaths so as
to be free of expecting care; failure
to love objects
to find them valuable in any way; failure
to preserve objects
to buy them and
to now let them fall by the wayside; failure
to think of poems as objects
to think of the body as an object; failure
to believe; failure
to know nothing; failure
to know everything; failure
to remember how to spell failure; failure
to believe the dictionary & that there is anything
to teach; failure
to teach properly; failure
to believe in teaching
to just think that everybody knows everything
which is not my failure; I know everyone does; failure
to see not everyone believes this knowing and
to think we cannot last till the success of knowing
to wash all the dishes only takes ten minutes
to write a thousand poems in an hour
to do an epic, open the unwashed window
to let in you know who and
to spirit thoughts and poems away from concerns
to just let us know, we will
to paint your ceilings & walls for free
"Failures in Infinitives" by Bernadette Mayer, from A Bernadette Mayer Reader. Copyright © 1968 by Bernadette Mayer. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
[via “alive on all channels”]
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why am i doing this?
why am i doing this? Failure
to keep my work in order so as
to be able to find things
to paint the house
to earn enough money to live on
to reorganize the house so as
to be able to paint the house &
to be able to find things and
earn enough money so as
to be able to put books together
to publish works and books
to have time
to answer mail & phone calls
to wash the windows
to make the kitchen better to work in
to have the money to buy a simple radio
to listen to while working in the kitchen
to know enough to do grownups work in the world
to transcend my attitude
to an enforced poverty
to be able to expect my checks
to arrive on time in the mail
to not always expect that they will not
to forget my mother’s attitudes on humility or
to continue
to assume them without suffering
to forget how my mother taunted my father
about money, my sister about i cant say it
failure to forget mother and father enough
to be older, to forget them
to forget my obsessive uncle
to remember them some other way
to remember their bigotry accurately
to cease to dream about lions which always is
to dream about them, I put my hand in the lion’s mouth
to assuage its anger, this is not a failure
to notice that’s how they were; failure
to repot the plants
to be neat
to create & maintain clear surfaces
to let a couch or a chair be a place for sitting down
and not a table
to let a table be a place for eating & not a desk
to listen to more popular music
to learn the lyrics
to not need money so as
to be able to write all the time
to not have to pay rent, con ed or telephone bills
to forget parents’ and uncle’s early deaths so as
to be free of expecting care; failure
to love objects
to find them valuable in any way; failure
to preserve objects
to buy them and
to now let them fall by the wayside; failure
to think of poems as objects
to think of the body as an object; failure
to believe; failure
to know nothing; failure
to know everything; failure
to remember how to spell failure; failure
to believe the dictionary & that there is anything
to teach; failure
to teach properly; failure
to believe in teaching
to just think that everybody knows everything
which is not my failure; I know everyone does; failure
to see not everyone believes this knowing and
to think we cannot last till the success of knowing
to wash all the dishes only takes ten minutes
to write a thousand poems in an hour
to do an epic, open the unwashed window
to let in you know who and
to spirit thoughts and poems away from concerns
to just let us know, we will
to paint your ceilings & walls for free
— Bernadette Mayer, “Failures in Infinitives” in “A Bernadette Mayer Reader (New Directions Publishing Corp., 1968) (via Alive on All Channels)
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Bernadette Mayer, Eruditio ex Memoria, Angel Hair Books, Lenox, MA and New York, NY, 1977 [Granary Books, New York, NY]. Cover by Bernadette Mayer
«Eruditio was done from random pages ripped from my school notebooks … it was fun to write and I think I did it to use the Latin word for memory. [...] I don't think anybody read it except the publishers and Ted Berrigan. Certainly nobody asked me what it was except of course Ted. It ends with a wonderful conceit about a woman turning away from a bowl and then, ghazal-like, I say my name.» – The Angel Hair Anthology, Granary Books, New York, NY, 2001, p. 591
#graphic design#poetry#drawing#handwriting#notation#visual writing#book#cover#book cover#bernadette mayer#angel hair books#granary books#1970s#2000s
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1968
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Bernadette Mayer, Lenox, Massachusetts, 1978.
RIP fellow dream poet, Bernadette Mayer. May your soul float toward the shawls of the dream as if they were the sky...
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