#22: to fall down from the love of my look
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the twenty-second one. As sometimes happens, they’re all combined together this month.
Boredom/Horror/Glory. Gillian White has an interesting piece about Bernadette Mayer in the New York Review of Books this month. She writes about the new edition of Mayer’s early-career text combining poetry and photography, Memory, and about Mayer’s poetics, which are part of performance art, part lyric poetry. White has so many great things to say about Mayer and her work, but there’s one thing I really don’t agree with. At the end of the article, White writes,
One struggles to understand the criticism made by some in Mayer’s circle that her more conventional “personal” writing makes a romance of domestic life.
Mayer isn’t exactly controversial; she’s quite beloved among her “circle” and in wider circles (e.g., two meaty New Yorker pieces on her in the last few years). But people are always rushing to her defense, like White does here. The reference to criticism is to a 1984 letter from one poet in Mayer’s circle (broadly defined) Lyn Hejinian, to another, Rae Armantrout, in which Hejinian says she thinks that Mayer makes too much of a “romance” out of homemaking. Hejinian didn’t publish this letter or anything, it’s in her archive at Berkeley and quoted in Ann Vickery’s Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (a wonderful book that tells a story of feminist poetry through ephemera like radio shows and short-lived, little-read literary journals).
I have mentioned to you before that among my many unpublished books is one where I attempted to re-enact Bernadette Mayer’s book Midwinter Day.
The conceit of Midwinter Day is that Mayer wrote the entire thing on December 22, 1978, the shortest day of the year. She balanced the writing of the book with her life: “mostly taking care of babies and entertaining friends,” as she put it in a 1989 lecture at Naropa University. During the poem/day, Mayer wakes up and ruminates on the night’s dreams, makes breakfast, lunch, and dinner, takes her two children to the library, cleans up, talks to friends, writes, thinks, daydreams, puts her kids to bed, has a drink, and then going to bed herself.
It is a romance, that that could ever be true—that you could write an epic poem, which is what Midwinter Day is, in a single day, as you are caring for two little kids and making dinner and lunch and breakfast and cleaning and talking and and AND…
“Nobody ever believes me when I tell them it was written in one day,” Mayer says in that Naropa lecture.
By nobody, I have to assume she means other women. Midwinter Day is not a feminist text in the way we currently define feminism, which doesn’t mean it’s not important or good. But saying it is feminist when it’s not, or saying it doesn’t make a romance out of homemaking when it does, seems to me like toxic positivity-style literary criticism. It presents motherhood and womanhood and writing, and the combination of all three of those things, as easy. Easy for Bernadette, easy and fun and beautiful and silly and charming and lyric, and if it’s like that for Bernadette, why is it so hard for you, you big idiot who’s so bad at being a mother/woman/writer?
Mayer’s work makes me think of this moment from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (by Roland Barthes):
I delight continuously, endlessly, in writing as in a perpetual production… But in our mercantile society, one must end up with a work, an “oeuvre”: one must construct, i.e., complete, a piece of merchandise. While I write, the writing is thereby at every moment flattened out, banalized, made guilty by the work to which it must eventually contribute.
The ultimate existence of a coherent, “complete,” “work” betrays the mess from which it came, the endless “perpetual production” that, Barthes could dream, doesn’t result in anything at all. Writing like that, unconstructed, unfinished, would be the only kind of writing that is true, as unromantic as life really is. The process, the perpetual production, to which Midwinter Day claims to be true, is belied by the beauty and coherence of its presentation.
Midwinter Day begins with an absolutely gorgeous section describing Mayer’s dreams as if from the inside as if she’s still dreaming as she writes.
Now it’s your turn to fall down from the love of my look
You stayed in the hotel called your daughter’s arms
No wonder the mother’s so forbidding, so hard to embrace
I only wait in the lobby, in the bar
I write
This writing/dreaming moment is on the first page of the book, and to me, it’s where the romance begins: that you could dream and write at the same time, raise children and write at the same time, cook and write, talk and write—and that doing so would result in such an “oeuvre.”
You stayed in the hotel called your daughter’s arms! How beautiful, clever, lovely, funny, dreamy!
She hides the hard part, the brutal lack of a room of one’s own.
And I think it’s okay to say that. I think we should say it.
I wish you a beautiful, clever, lovely, funny, dreamy, unconstructed, honest, romantic, unromantic 2021. Til next month—
Sincerely,
Lucy