Memory
Bernadette Mayer
$45
Friends of BERNADETTE MAYER FUNDRAISER and Midwinter Day Marathon Reading
New York Times Best (Photography) Books!
“The photos are necessarily small (roughly 2½ inches by 1¾ inches), arrayed in grids of nine, along with intermittent full-page blowups, and as lovely as individual images are, their power is cumulative: a wide-ranging work of personal cinema, in stills. Her journal provides the narration in galloping long-breath prose poetry that feels as spontaneous and alive as the pictures.” —Luc Sante, New York Times
Memory made more “Best of 2020” lists: The Brooklyn Rail, Cultured, Elephant, and Ursula!
POST45 essays on the work of Bernadette Mayer, including a piece about translating Memory to book form.
An archive of daily July 2020 readings from Memory online at Poets House!
REVIEWS & EXCERPTS
Art Agendause
Artforum (interview and reading)
Bookforum
Burlington Contemporary
BOMB
Brooklyn Rail
Elephant
Entropy
Frieze (new writing with images from Memory)
Hyperallergic
Garage
JSTOR Daily
London Review of Books
Music & Literature
The Nation
The New York Review of Books
The New Yorker
New York Times T Magazine
Paris Review Daily (excerpt)
Poets & Writers
Publishers Weekly
Rain Taxi
The Rumpus
Times Literary Supplement
TANK
Ursula
Listen to the original audio recording at the Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives at the University of California, San Diego.
A short history of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory
About Bernadette Mayer
Bernadettemayer.com
The Poetry Project
Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments (at UPenn’s Electronic Poetry Center)
Bernadette Mayer’s New Directions books
“How to Look in the Mirror Without Saying ‘I’”: Profile by Daniel Wenger in The New Yorker
Reviews of the 2017 installation
CANADA Gallery
Interview at The Brooklyn Rail
Artforum
ArtNews
frieze
Hyperallergic
In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: For one month she exposed a roll of 35mm film and kept a daily journal. The result was a conceptual work that investigates the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures and material. Memory is both monumental in scope (over 1100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and a groundbreaking work by a poet who is widely regarded as one of the most innovative writers of her generation. Presaging Mayer’s durational and constraint-based diaristic works of poetry, it also evinces her extraordinary—and unheralded—contribution to conceptual art.
Mayer has called Memory “an emotional science project,” but it is far from confessional. Rather, this boldly experimental record follows the poet’s eye as she traverses early morning into night, as quotidian minutiae metamorphose into the lyrical, as her stream of consciousness becomes incantatory. The space of memory in Mayer’s work is hyper-precise but also evanescent and expansive. In both text and image, Mayer constructs the mercurial, fleeting consciousness of the present moment from which memory is—as she says—“always there, to be entered, like the world of dreams or an ongoing TV show.”
This publication brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form, making space for a work that has been legendary but mostly invisible. Originally exhibited in 1972 by pioneering gallerist Holly Solomon, it was not shown again in its entirety until 2016. The text was published without the photographs in 1975 and has been long out of print.
ABOUT BERNADETTE MAYER
Bernadette Mayer (b. 1945, Brooklyn, NY) is the author of over thirty books including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, as well as the The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994), and most recently Works and Days (2016) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, Mayer has also been an influential teacher and editor. In the art world, she is best known for her collaboration with Vito Acconci as editors of the influential mimeographed magazine 0 TO 9. Read more about Mayer here.
Bernadette Mayer Fundraiser and Midwinter Day Celebration
Join us in honoring and celebrating Bernadette Mayer’s contributions to poetry and the arts...
A short history of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory
A short history of Bernadette Mayer's Memory, a monumental, conceptual art work that investigates...
