Language Is a TemptationOnline at Poets House, New York CityA 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.
SCHEDULE OF READERS (Links to archived videos)
July 1: Anselm Berrigan
July 2: Anaïs Duplan
July 3: Jen Bervin
July 4: Bill DeNoyelles
July 5: J’Lyn Chapman
July 6: Tausif Noor
July 7: Jill Magi
July 8: Peter Gizzi
July 9: Aldrin Valdez
July 10: Sarah Cain
July 11: Ann Stephenson
July 12: Greg Masters
July 13: Rona Cran
July 14: Andrew Durbin
July 15: Lee Ann Brown
July 16: Olivier Brossard
July 17: Peggy DeCoursey
July 18: Barbara Epler
July 19: Matt Connors
July 20: Brenda Coultas
July 21: Stephen Motika
July 22: Fanny Howe
July 23: Grace Murphy
July 24: Giovanni Singleton
July 25: Morgan Ritter
July 26: Emmy Catedral
July 27: Tammy Nguyen
July 28: Rachel Valinsky
July 29: Urayoán Noel
July 30: Lynne Sachs
July 31: Bernadette Mayer
see also
✼ natalie’s upstate weather report:
April 11, 2024 — The spring peepers have thawed (these little frogs freeze in winter) and now, unabashedly randy, they chirp. At first there was one, then two, and now it sounds like thousands. Two days ago, when it was truly spring, their adamantine chorus was almost deafening (we closed the windows to simply think!). Siglio has relocated to a lush, thriving hollow at the furthest most edge of the Berkshires after two years of peripatetics, sans library—which is now unpacked in a less than Benjaminian manner (little time to contemplate—our urgency in getting books on shelves mirrored the peepers need to mate). The first few months of 2024 were almost unendurable, but we’re home, spring is here, and there are books to made. We are singing!
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