Language Is a TemptationOnline at Poets House, New York City
A reading everyday in July 2020 of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

events, 06/30/20

Detail of grid of all 1100+ photographs from *Memory* by Bernadette Mayer.

In 1971, for the month of July, poet Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: each day she exposed a roll of 35mm film and kept a journal. The result was a groundbreaking, conceptual work that investigates the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures and material. Memory, comprised of more than 1100 photographs and two hundred pages of text, presages the durational and constraint-based works of a poet widely regarded as one of the most innovative writers of her generation. Originally conceived as an installation of photographs with a six-hour audio recording, Memory is now a book, published by Siglio, in which the full sequence of images and text come together for the first time on the page, making space for a work that has been legendary but mostly invisible.

Now, almost fifty years later in 2020, for the month of July, Poets House and Siglio are launching “Language Is a Temptation: Daily Readings from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory” with an exciting and diverse roster of poets, writers, scholars, and artists reading from Memory. The series celebrates the release of the book, but it also intends to be its own experiment, a kind of parallel durational work collapsing time, infiltrating social media with a different species of self-recording, connecting one consciousness to another as well as to collective memory.

How it works:

Every day this July, a passage from the corresponding day in 1971 will be read at 3 p.m. EST across the Poets House social media platforms on Instagram (IGTV), Twitter, and Facebook. The video will also feature text being read as well as a small selection of images from that day’s entry in Memory. The videos will be archived on YouTube.