What Is This That's Happening Now?

“This journal is as confused, mixed up, as this time is,” Bernadette Mayer confesses in Milkweed Smithereens (New Directions, 2022), a compendium of observations of life under quarantine and her first full collection in five years. She continues, “Let me forget all about it, i’m 75 years old, a lot of people are dying from this virus, i don’t care if i do, but i’d like not to be so nervous all the time.” The book comprises 30 pages of diaristic prose poetry, the 16-page “from The Covid Diary,” the 14-page “from The Second World of Nature or Next Planet,” a chronicle of how a pandemic distorts one's sense of self and time, and 37 miscellaneous poems, two of which are collaborations with her partner, the poet Philip Good. Milkweed Smithereens is a thoughtful distillation of Mayer’s oeuvre, whose overriding obsession throughout the past 50 years has been the attempt to capture on the page the real-time experience of consciousness.

Like its predecessor, Works and Days (2016), inspired by the Greek poet Hesiod’s eponymous agrarian didactic poem, Milkweed Smithereens is anchored firmly in and around Mayer’s home in East Nassau, a rural village in upstate New York. Mayer hikes along Kinderhook Creek or works from her back porch, all the while attempting to decode the rhythm of the natural world that constantly intrudes upon her, especially in the shape of stinkbugs as they pour out of every crevice. Mayer writes,

where do they go at night? under the daybed? the stinkbug’s right there like a miniature prehistoric dinosaur except with antennae, staring at me; i can smell the cedar oil tic repellent […] i think many of us know that dreams can be precognitive but we couldn’t “prove” it, the concept of prove is kind of stupid, but whales know they are, so we’ve learned from them but not everyone would learn from a whale i guess & i couldn’t prove that from a whale’s perspective everything is precognitive including lampshades.

Despite their admittedly grim raison d'être, the excerpts titled “from The Covid Diary” nearly always maintain a hopeful outlook in the midst of pandemic despair. “People will forget how much they like each other” Mayer writes as she watches children play at a watering hole. The sight of humanity at its interconnected best produces some truly beautiful, often anarchic, life-affirming passages: “in catastrophes the best & most mutual-aidish is brought out in people—who needs governments. some mistake was once made that we need leaders! leaders lead to monuments & they just have to be taken down. the future’s more in the past but what is this that’s happening now?”

Set in the summer and fall of 2020—no year is given, but Mayer references the George Floyd protests, Donald Trump’s Tulsa rally, and the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War—The Covid Diary flits between autobiography, social commentary, and Mayer’s intensely minutiose cataloguing of her natural surroundings. Predictably, Trump looms large; he’s name-checked more than a half-dozen times. (“Trump’s gotten rid of all environmental deterrents to climate change,” reads a representative example.) The tone of these versified diaries is decidedly apocalyptic—“in an imminent nuclear war we’ll be annihilated anyway, in this world”—as Mayer references environmental crises and political turmoil in the United States, but it’s a bleakness the poet tackles head-on in cheeky lines such as “i see blue because someone in my species blew it.”

Readers also get front-row seats to the effects of isolation-induced neurosis as Mayer lounges around watching Aerial Ireland, a Smithsonian Channel program that explores the Emerald Isle via cross-country flights. The narrative then veers off on various tangents, including the “copper dilemma,” meaning how copper in people’s diets might contribute to an uptick in Alzheimer’s disease, or musings about Mayan mounds in Alabama, referring to a widely debunked claim that Mayan ruins were found in the southern state roughly a decade ago. There’s even an X-Files-esque digression on “the lengthening of the head like extraterrestrials,” depicting Mayer falling down the rabbit hole of internet paranoia before The Covid Diary takes another surreal turn: “maybe all the dinosaurs will come back & gobble up all the humans.”

Despite these digressions, Mayer’s poems are steadfastly loyal to a practical quotidian reality, and the visionary and sublime aspects of her poems—her exultations—remain rooted there, recalling the everydayness of Frank O’Hara and Lorine Niedecker. Most important, however, Mayer is, and always has been, a child of Thoreau, as she makes explicit toward the end of her diary: “after my parents died i was adopted by [French actress] jeanne moreau & henry david thoreau.” Like Thoreau, Mayer combines personal reflections with close observation of the natural world, chronicling the individual’s experience when confronted with the twin forces of entropy and societal change. One also detects a slight vein of Robinson Jeffers-esque inhumanism in Mayer’s later work that finds full expression in Milkweed Smithereens:

the leaves’ve stopped falling for a day, a skinny-leafed branch waving in the wind looks like an extraterrestrial, just like me. humans & other mammals have ancient viruses in their bodies, some think to keep mothers from eating their children. or maybe they could be extraterrestrial ingredients, so that life could occur.

Mayer seems to share Jeffers’s disdain for the supremacist excesses of solipsism, which often encourages humans to consider life around us—and the universe itself—solely on our terms. Indeed, as was the case with Jeffers, there is an electrifying current of anti-humanism in Mayer’s poetry that seeks to highlight human frailty as well as reorient people’s thinking to embrace a more comprehensive awareness of their place in the world:

“anthropocene” might be the end of the world, literally. however that’s said it’s all wrong. for one thing it’d be kind of hard to end the world via  pollution. starvation, maybe, no growing season, probably, a violent cataclysm, maybe all the dinosaurs will come back & gobble up all the humans—what a place to be left, east nassau overrun with deer tics, but who will they eat? just one human?

Meditative asides of this kind, rising organically out of Mayer’s notes on the shifting seasons and her impressions (and expressions) of living with the coronavirus, characterize some of the best writing in the book. Roughly halfway through The Covid Diary, she introduces Alice Zachariewicz, her neighbor across the road, who has put up a sign that reads “welcome to gethsemane hill.” Mayer writes, “i don’t think anyone is ever welcomed there, it’s where christians believe jesus christ was crucified. if you go up the hill, alice has made the stations of the cross which are like dioramas where you stop & meditate on suffering. i forget what they all are.” Later, the poet talks “to the greens,” meaning plants: “would anybody like to go to gethsemane hill with me? i have to atone for my sins.”

***

Mayer was born in 1945 to a Catholic German family in Ridgewood, a neighborhood in the “disputed territory” between Brooklyn and Queens. Her early years were marred by tragedy, when she lost both her parents in quick succession—her mother, Marie, a secretary, and her father, Theodore, “an electrician who loved Frankenstein,” as she wrote in an earlier poem. Passages in Milkweed Smithereens recall that difficult time in a more candid manner than in any of her previous works:

walking home from church, the daily news magazine had elvis presley who r & i were forbidden to listen to on the cover. when i got home i found out that my father had died, I was 12. the local parish priest was there, did he come on to me? do you want to see him (my father)? I said no. he’d died in the bathroom. he’d been home from work with muscle spasms, at least that’s what i was told. then i got my period for the first time. My mother already had breast cancer & had lost a breast. my homelife was a nightmare, later my uncle took us out to buy us records. i felt that this was a very weird idea, replacing my father with an LP? i helped pick out what my father would wear in his coffin, opting for the pink tie & gray suit, i felt that the grimness we felt need not be communicated. In my childhood i spent some time trying to comprehend what was happening. i’d lie on the bed, tracing the patterns of the bedspread’s design, never succeeding. i needed assistance. i became a very serious person.

Categorized as part of the second wave of the New York School—a status cemented by her inclusion in Ron Padgett and David Shapiro’s An Anthology of New York Poets (1970), the only woman among 27 contributors—Mayer’s earliest work was characterized by a passion for linguistic inquiry and a quasi-clinical handling of diction, lacking the expansiveness of her later work. Arguably her greatest artistic turning point was prompted by her textual-audio-visual installation Memory (1971), in which she documents her life over the course of a month via more than 1,000 photographs, several hours of audio recordings, and 200 pages of journals. (The project was exhibited at 98 Greene Street, Holly Solomon’s legendary gallery in New York, in 1972; it was published as a book, sans photos, in 1975.) It took Mayer a few more years to develop the style for which she became known, namely the overlapping of everyday activities with psychic scrutiny and feminist aesthetics. Her style found its earliest and fullest expression in the books she composed while living in rural New England in the 1970s with her then-husband, the poet Lewis Warsh: Studying Hunger (1975), The Golden Book of Words (1978), and Midwinter Day (1982), her book-length epic on motherhood set over the course of a single day.

Though Mayer’s artistic touchstones include Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, as well as Greek and Roman classics, the radical poetics of William Carlos Williams may be her defining influence. As Mayer once expressed to her friend and coeval Alice Notley in a letter quoted in the latter’s Doctor Williams’ Heiresses (1980), a lecture-cum-epistolary-dialogue:

I’ve always been very grateful to Williams for resuscitating the prose mixed with poetry form which is a form I like and seems like a good form to be in a hurry in. [...] for all the years I had a car, I would always carry around the complete poems of Wm. Carlos Williams in my trunk because I always thought it was somehow necessary to have them  there, just like I read somewhere about a taxi-driver, or actually it was that I met one once who told me that he always had a case of beer in his trunk because he knew that no matter what the exigencies of driving around NY might turn out to be, that would be all that he needed.

Taking Williams’s cue, Mayer jumps back and forth between the abstract and the concrete, the demotic and the lyric, prose and verse, always casting an eye on the dark mysteries of the creative process, a practice Mayer appears to recall in “I Am Your Food I Am Your Fate,” the only formal, rhyming poem in Milkweed Smithereens:

in my poems I like to talk about what happens in my heart
and I know I’m cold and selfish but it’s part of the art
of learning to know that my world won’t go away
it’s behind me every night it’s before me every day

Unlike Williams, however, Mayer has shown herself to be wary of crystallized imagistic isolation and has instead situated her poems at the crossroads of hyperbole and discursive junctions. To that effect, she has long investigated the multiplicities of human intimacy, and this latest collection is no different. In her erotically charged poetry, sexual desire is understood as a broad spectrum, as suggested by lines from one of the book’s shorter, untitled poems: “I walk through the woods wondering about sex / I walk through the city craving the Indian men and / the Korean women & the Japanese women & the white men too.” Mayer’s conception of sex is at least partly predicated on her rebellion against her Catholic background, as evidenced by lines from “I Am Taken about Your Actual Fish”:

for me, to eat has been
ruined by the catholic church
for that “host” to be a body
& then to swallow it
is enough to ruin swallowing
& hunger forever, mr. jesus christ
especially when your servants
put their cocks in my mouth

Milkweed Smithereens follows in the wake of recent reissues of some of Mayer’s long out-of-print projects, many from the 1970s, including Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer (Station Hill Press, 2015), Memory (Siglio Press, 2020), and The Basketball Article Comic Book, with Anne Waldman, illustrated by Jason Novak (Franchise, 2021). This mini revival allows readers to discover (or rediscover) the work of this vitally important poet and suggests the extent to which Mayer’s model of the politicized prose-poetry hybrid has become prevalent in contemporary poetry, particularly in the work of Claudia Rankine, Hoa Nguyen, Bhanu Kapil, and Maggie Nelson, among others; its relevance is unlikely to fade for some time.

As for Milkweed Smithereens, it demonstrates that Mayer still has much to say, and though the world she depicts is certainly on fire, there is a lot to love in it. Which is just as well since there is no escaping it, as she not so subtly implies in “Stephen Hawking”:

the distance
to alpha centauri
is so great, friends
that to reach it
in a human lifetime
a spacecraft would
have to carry roughly
fuel with the mass
of all the stars
in the galaxy

Lucky for us, we’re stuck here with her.