Poetry State Forest

by Bernadette Mayer

“One of the most interesting, exciting, and open of late-20th century experimental poets.”―Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle Bernadette Mayer mixes together nature poems, pastiches, sonnets, prose poetry, and epigrams to create Poetry State Forest.

Genres: Poetry

196 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 2008

About the author

Bernadette Mayer (born May 12, 1945) is an American poet, writer, and visual artist associated with both the Language poets and the New York School. Mayer's record-keeping and use of stream-of-consciousness narrative are two trademarks of her writing, though she is also known for her work with form and mythology. In addition to the influence of her textual-visual art and journal-keeping, Mayer's poetry is widely acknowledged as some of the first to speak accurately and honestly about the experience of motherhood. Mayer edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci, and, until 1983, United Artists books and magazines with Lewis Warsh. Mayer taught at the New School for Social Research, where she earned her degree in 1967, and, during the 1970s, she led a number of workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York. From 1980 to 1984, Mayer served as director of the Poetry Project, and her influence in the contemporary avant-garde is felt widely, with writers like Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, John Giorno, and Anne Waldman having sat in on her workshops.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 4 out of 5]

review of
Bernadette Mayer's Poetry State Forest
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 17-20, 2019

For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/... or be DAMNED!

Meyer probably 1st came to my attn in the late 1970s as someone associated w/ Language Poetry. I don't recall that making much sense to me b/c her poetry didn't strike me as 'non-transparent'. Still, her "Experiments" ( wch is presented in a larger version here: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/... ) is in the 1st edition (&, presumably, later ones too) of The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine that focused on theoretical issues of such writing that the bk is culled from, presented work relevant to & by a variety of people who I think the editors were just interested in. As such, Hannah Weiner was there, as was something about Louis Zukofsky. I don't think they necessarily 'belonged' but I was interested in all the work & was glad the magazine was more inclusive than exclusive.

It seems that Mayer doesn't have much fondness for her Language Poetry days. In her Winner of the Bad Poem Contest she writes:

"Just throw em under the pile
all the bad poems written
never to be seen again
all the poems of
the twentieth century"

[..]

"the language poems
about
something or other, throw
em all over a pile" - p 57

I'm sure I read her "Experiments" & liked it. I have a copy of her Moving, wch I also read but don't remember at all. What clinched my interest in her was her bk Studying Hunger (1975). The cover has a close-cropped shot of her face. To anyone who's familiar w/ how it feels to fast, her fasting will be immediately apparent. There's a CLARITY. I've gone w/o food fairly often, sometimes b/c of poverty, sometimes b/c I chose to. For those who have the discipline to fast, it's an extraordinary experience. That experience radiates from the picture of Mayer's face.

After that? There're so many things to read. Even tho I was interested in Mayer, in the long-run she was only one of many. MANY. Maybe I read Studying Hunger in the early 1980s. It wasn't until over 20 yrs later that I read her poems in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (2008). The only poem that did it for me was her "First turn to me. . . ." (1992) the sexual explicitness & passion of wch is something that I can deeply relate to. As w/ Studying Hunger, if you've been there, you recognize it.

A sidenote here is that if your writing is truly experimental, as much of mine is, & you prefer to operate outside of the cliché categories &, therefore, don't call yourself a poet or say that you've writing poetry, YOU WILL BE MOSTLY IGNORED. If they can't pigeonhole you in an established category then, chances are, there will be no interest. I'm looking for people beyond category. We are a rarity. I'm looking for polymaths. We are a rarity.

I became interested in Mayer again when I learned that she & Vito Acconci edited a magazine together called 0 to 9. Vito Acconci is an artist whose work I have total admiration for. I knew that in his early phase he was a writer but I still haven't read much, or any, of his writing. I was also pleasantly surprised to learn that she'd been the director of the St Marks Poetry Project from 1980 to 1984. In short, Mayer has led an interesting life.

I performed a Mad Scientist Didaction at the St Marks Poetry Project on Monday, May 27, 1985, that some of the attendees tried to prevent from continuing. I wonder if Mayer was there? See the 1st entry here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOut... .

SO, on March 22, 2019, I was at Caliban Books in PGH celelbrating Lawrence Ferlinghetti's approaching 100th birthday by reading dome of his poetry ( https://youtu.be/c-FLu6yW_TY ) where I took advantage of their 55% off poetry sale & bought Poetry State Forest. I only had enuf money to buy 1 bk & it was toss-up between this & a Cubist collection. I probably shd've gotten the Cubist one but it was more expensive. Anyway, I'm still glad I got this one & I'm glad I read more Mayer.

"when my children were growing up
we never had candy at home but
when we went to poetry readings
i always brought chocolate bars
to make the poetry palatable or
more interesting so they'd
be relatively quiet, it only backfired" - p 3

I'm not generally interested in 'discursive poetry' or 'autobiographical poetry' & Poetry State Forest falls largely in those categories. I'm much more interested in writing along these lines: http://permutations.pleintekst.nl/neo... — but the subtxt of that wd be hidden to most readers. But there're people whose lives interest me & people whose lives are of less interest to me. Given the 'authenticity' of Mayer's writing about fasting & sex I can relate too much to not be interested. Even the excerpt from the above-quoted Chocolate Poetry Sonnet appeals to me in a very direct way. I'm sure that Mayer has been a pleasure to be around. I wish I knew her personally. Maybe I shd make an effort in that direction — but I doubt that I ever will. Her website, https://www.bernadettemayer.com , has no contact info that I cd find. That's usually a bad sign.

I wd credit Mayer w/ being politically savvy but reading this excerpt from her Howard Zinn Sonnet makes me wonder:

"having lived through two wars, time to cease
fire forever! any newborn would agree!" - p 5

Howard Zinn, for those of you who don't know, is the author of A People's History of the United States, a groundbreaking work in defiance of history-belonging-to-the-victor. But, "two wars"? Even if Mayer wrote that in the mid-'70s & is only talking about wars in wch the US played a major part, she wd've already lived thru the Korean War & the Vietnam War, as well as conflicts in Lebanon, the Congo, & the Dominican Republic. In the 66 yrs that I've been alive, the US has never not been at war. If there were no other 'justification' for this, I suspect that most or all government leaders think it's advisable to have battle-hardened troops available at all times. It's ironic, isn't it? In this day & age no smoking laws can be enforced for the hypothetical good of the population but war still goes on. Isn't war bad for our health too?

"i guess patriots dont smoke; in new york city
a fancy restaurant has a heated stretch limousine
parked outside to smoke in after dinner" - p 22

Why not do the same thing w/ war? If you want to wage war, there's an unheated stretch limousine outside that you're welcome to do it in.

Mayer's sexually explicit poem in Postmodern American Poetry is probably relevant to this:

"now that poems've got everything in them
even rhetoric and dailiness plus the names of things again
including flowers like the spotted touch-me-not
so inviting to hummingbirds
& I'm writing one
& it's so touch & go with men & women
I'd like to mention to say blatantly
I got my period today
probably like nobody
certainly in the nineteenth century ever did" - pp 26-27

I tend to think she's right about that — but what if no-one dared publish such a poem? Wd we know about it now?

It was in her WIHAHITITTUAVTB * What I Have Always Heard Is That It Typifies and Vacates the Body that I was. once again, struck by how eerily close some of Mayer's experiences & mine have been:

"1. You don't aggressively soothe the butter
2. And the aspen, list theorists
3. Stop give me ten good readings and one for good measure" - p 46

Why does this resonate w/ me so deeply? On p 47 she explains: "These are 30 of the sentences that I perceived while in a hypnagogic state, that is, the state between sleeping and waking." I've been keeping a list of such phrases since 1975, although I've neglected the list for the better part of the last 30 yrs or more, & I've collected together these txts in a bk called Telepathy Receptivity Training (wch I published in fall, 1991). A website about that is here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book199... . Some of my readings of it are here: https://youtu.be/dDrKuf7ybE8?t=1188 & here: https://youtu.be/SeKRPVGa_ko . Here're 3 of the earlier lines:

"i put german cars into the pencil
she's such a cheerful little fleaklist
she's afraid the heel is fallin' off her liver" - http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book199...

As soon as I read Mayer's 1st lines I recognized the state of mind they were written in even before I read her end explanation. That might not seem like much to some people but it means alot to me.

"here people steal spongebob squarepants
from the tops of burger kings" - p 48

Something relevant is an excerpt from my review of William S. Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg's Don't Hide the Madness, esp Steven Taylor's introduction:

""One of my between-tour jobs was to compile all the footnotes from the foreign editions of Ginsberg's work and then go through his whole oeuvre to make footnotes explaining various persons, events, etc. This was aimed at the Collected Poems 1947-1980, then in preparation. I asked him what should get a footnote. He said, "Anything a high school kid fifty years from now might not understand." So, for example, one of the foreign editions had a footnote explaining "supermarket." At the time, I thought it kind of crazy that in the US collection of the Collected, "supermarket" would need explanation. But fifty years ahead would have been 2032, so who knows? Young readers might need that explained, just as my generation needed a footnote explaining the "automat" of the 1940s. The man thought long-term. Many of my footnotes were culled later in the editing process by less prophetic heads." - pp i-ii

"NOW, that's the sort of thing that I think is important. It's a scholar's issue. I agree w/ Ginsberg & Taylor here. If I were to talk to a so-called "Millenarian' now & mention Federico Fellini, arguably one of the most famous film directors of the middle to late 20th century (active 1945-1992), how many of them wd have any idea who he is? They're more likely to know who directed a recent Batman film. Maybe." - "Don't Hide (unless you're Ginsberg's mom)": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...

In other words, I find it interesting wondering how much of "here people steal spongebob squarepants / from the tops of burger kings" will be comprehensible to future readers? I know that "spongebob squarepants" is a cartoon character, w/ the attendant action figures & the like, & I know that "burger kings" are a chain of fast food restaurants — but how people will know that a mere 50 yrs from now? Even now, as I'm reading this poetry, I find things that I'm sure will be missed by many readers — a phrase from a song that a person familiar w/ the song might sing while reading the poem, e.g.. But what about the people who don't know the song? A reader will find a deeper relationship to the poem when these shared cultural experiences are referred to.

"I remember when a crazed nun in the fifth grade
during the mccarthy era said to us
how many of you would die for your faith
if the communists came, raise your hands" - p 54

This is the same kind of morbid insanity that Moslem children are subjected to as well as Christians. I publish an audio cassette by Beth Anderson on one side & Gayle Hansen on the other. On Gayle's side she tells a similar story & said that she began studying communism after that. Thank the holy ceiling light that even children can manage to see thru the brainwashing from time-to-time. Mayer can be a political poet. Take her parody, Idyll as an example:

"On the way up the hill
I threw my cigarette butt
into the pile of shit the poodle
had left in the sand & wandered on
through the forest" - p 61

[..]

"At dusk I go back down to the lake
to throw our garbage in & drink in
some more of the beauties of nature" - p 62

I'd say she captures the mindset of a callous polluter of nature fairly well.

"Solstice Anthem Against Fear

If nothing happened

A big ugly man with flowers on a skateboard

Yet I do want your company

Do you speak Bardo?

This untaught being into another way of seeing

That could be spent making love which is all" - p 64

Having recently watched "David Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth" about insects & having seen shot after shot of the processes that various insects go thru in order to couple & the male transfers its giant ball of sperm to the egg-bearer, the thought of fucking as "making love" is mostly humorous to me. One type of spider has a female 4 or 5 times the size of the male. The male has to approach carefully or the female will just eat him. Even if they mate she might just eat him afterward anyway. You might argue that humans aren't insects. I might argue that we're not as far apart as might be typically thought.

"Images & Phrases From Shakespeare's Sonnets & Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels

roses have thorns
big cow-y deer
those tears are pearl
an electromagnetic crazy arrangement of bored eternal power
strong offense's cross
eventual searing blisters like needles
silver fountains (have) mud
tugs hoot in the harbor
I travel forth without my cloak
mosquitoes humming in harmony" - p 69

Tractor Pull! Monster Poets Raised 10 Feet Off The Ground by Drugs!

So far I've only quoted excerpts. Here's a whole shebang dagnabbit-all-to-heck poem:

"Wren Warbler Sonnet

the wind blowing on one of those
innocent days, this year we became
landlords of birds on the front porch
robins, starlings, wrens, warblers
they pay no rent, we clean up their shit
once in the warbler nest there was a squabble
feathers & nest stuff everywhere, i had seen
a wren go into the warbler enclave, maybe
i was mistaken, perhaps for a visit
just one bird to another, on my plate i put
all the downed feathers covered by petrified rock
i thought, i am way too involved with these birds
next day a warbler said to me
that wren is a terrorist, report him" - p 71

Those last 2 lines shd be indented but whenever I've tried to use the html to do that it didn't work but that doesn't really bother me like that letter z does. What do I like about the above poem? Not that much, really.. but at the same time that I was typing it I was listening to Obray Ramsey playing what I think was probably "Lonesome Road Blues" at a pretty fast pace on the banjo & that made it all seem so exciting. Shows to go ya. Then again, I like birds & I like the poet's being "way too involved with these birds" & I'm amused by the fantasy of a warbler telling the poet that the wren's a terrorist. Are we there yet?

Mayer seems somewhat unconcerned whether Poetry State Forest has any meta-structure, she seems satisfied (I envision her sitting on her haunches, all haunched over) with just having one poem after another, some of them united by her recounting of her life w/ Phil, most of them apparently chosen just b/c she likes them. She does spoof:

"I think that I shall never see
Easy puddings in a tree
You say you must type everything
You can't read your words in handwriting
Mary says she has a double or a twin
And now a triplet
And she is a skinny energetic person too" - p 72

How much of this poetry is written for her friends? Why, just t'other day, I saw an Easy pudding in a tree & I asked how that terrorist wren situation was going & they looked at me like I was crazy. ALSO, I never sd anything about typewriting. ALSOALSO, are we talking about the same Mary?

She also listens to other people.

"Ancient Brooklyn Talk by the Boardwalk

We're at fucking Cooney Eyeland now not that fancy fucking abandoned lake inna fuckin Berkshires dontcha wanna be the virgin mother fer me people fallin in love hey Duke what the fuck man getthefuckouttahere dat's my girlfrien's birdsnest Da-neece Da-neece you fucking turn me fuckin on Lew you fuckin shit ass Jew turn up yr fuckin ghetto blaster louder yeah ok some fairy raybans them fuckin spics got lookit them fuckin secret-fairies wanna go inta the tunnel of love wit me" - p 80

Puhleese, watch your language! I'm trying to write a class review here.

"Don't-Drink-Bush-Beer Sestina

c'mere all of you, my sestina writers
i'm coming to you from east nassau which
is having indian summer, it's 60° & bush
is still ostensible president of the fallout
from his own lies, i wish for his downfall
fuck you, you fucking fuck

is written on a new orleans t-shirt. fuck
you, i reiterate to bush; writers
should work for bush's downfall
as the so-called president of a country which
is a so-called democracy; stay in your fallout
shelters till bush blows away or he (bush)" - p 82

"A complex French verse form, usually unrhymed, consisting of six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoy. The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas; the closing envoy contains all six words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines. The patterns of word repetition are as follows, with each number representing the final word of a line, and each row of numbers representing a stanza:

          1 2 3 4 5 6
          6 1 5 2 4 3
          3 6 4 1 2 5
          5 3 2 6 1 4
          4 5 1 3 6 2
          2 4 6 5 3 1
          (6 2) (1 4) (5 3)" - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/lear...

Don't-Drink-Bush-Beer Sestina ends w/:

"rise up, writers! solve universal problems!
end the bush reign! let this fallout
signal his downfall, so in peace we fuck!" - p 83

NOW, if I understand the sestina definition above, Mayer's poem is not a sestina. If "The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas" then the 2nd stanza wd've had to end something like this:

'fucking fuck fuck you, you' instead of as it did: "shelters till bush blows away or he (bush)"

I'm sorry, Ms Mayer, but we're going to have to let you go.

After that blow to her ego she started talking w/ her house:

"H: I've had it with your dreams, you think anything you dream is true.

B: And my poetry too.

H: That's another thing, all those poetry books. Where did all the Hebrew books go?

B: Sorry the Rabbi doesn't live here anymore — just us poets. And Hector too.

H: Yes, the dog is a fine addition, even if he leaves his hair everywhere.

B: I'm glad you approve of the dog. And how do you feel about all the poets meeting on your porch?

H: My porch is falling apart and needs to be painted like the rest of me.

B: I'm sorry we're not rich enough to hire a crew of painters to restore your beauty." - p 94

Rich enough, Schmich enough. Paint it yourself. To be fair, though, I had to reconcrete the back foundation wall of my house & I did a good enough job but I never want to have to do that again.

[Guttersnipe Das · Rating 5 out of 5]

As life is short and uncertain, read the ‘A Bernadette Mayer Reader’ first, if you haven’t already. After that, this book is a grand ticket to liberty, a gift. USE EVERYTHING, declared Gertrude Stein, but who can actually do that? Who can make it charming? So far, as far as I can tell, only Stein and John Cage and Bernadette Mayer.

There are some poetry books that serve me as monuments. I can only prostrate before them. Whereas with this one, well, I’d have to be physically restrained from scribbling alongside.

There are truly great poems and sequences, enough to make one ready to picket the Library of America for a Bernadette Mayer volume. (My list : “Some Spring Journal 2001”, “40-60”, “Winner of the Bad Poem Contest”, “Eye & Brain”.)

Other poems display Mayer’s willingness to use everything, share everything. They’re hit or miss. Which means there’s hope for the rest of us! For example, there are 31 daily sonnets from 2007, which mostly begin from the weather, which (this being New England) is reliably gloomy. There’s “Old Notebook”, which can seem like babble, purely aleatory. About to dismiss it, I had a second thought : “If I had stolen this from her house it would be my most prized possession, more important to me than my passport.”

When I read books of poems, including poets I adore (OHara, Pessoa, HD, Olson, Spicer, Baudelaire), I think “This is how it ought to be done”. And also, “There’s no hope for me”. This book, on the other hand, is a ticket to liberty, an invitation to cavort in words and grammar. She makes it all an experiment. I guess anyone could do that. But somehow, she makes the experiments so much fun. She is so brave and also such good company. We are right to revere her work and her memory.

[Gabriel Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense forest of verse indeed. And prose, and lists, and poems readable and unreadable (but still valuable). I don't know when I might need five pages of translations of Greek words beginning with 'phil' but it functions both as a useful resource for word-hoarders and a touching devotional love poem. Other poems are political, tender, hairy, overgrown (even the more obviously honed come with a bit of stubble) and trail deep into the poet's mind. I like these poems. I like the texture and the sense of a a long ramble with a roving unsatisfied intellect or a short interaction with a challenging individual in a supermarket queue. I don't always understand (or feel) what's going on in the denser thickets but I like them. Even now, having just finished and closed this book, I open it again and find another line (there are too many to contain in a single or a dozen readings) and get sucked in again.

[Svea · Rating 3 out of 5]

all over the place but interesting

[Paul Klinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much about getting old. Turning sedentary but staying lively and lashing things. Having a whip braided from gray hair. Who knows anything about Bernadette Mayer and regrets. I keep thinking about Hannah Weiner giving her $60,000.00.

I like the way she talks about her mind and what she was able to do twenty years ago in writing a book and now writing a book. That health is a regret in this kind of way, which is funny. And her grip on the scene, what it is and how she feels about it. This gives me hope.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The all hanging out and the lack of a snowblower, the tenebrous winter, the peeking. The dangling couplet, the twosome, the yoke, the other just-as-good yoke, the home stretch, the briars among the eggs, the new neighbors, the landscape of tyranny that has other names, the index of conversation, the breastplate, the snowblower o! and b for bushes, the caterwaul, the list of phil(s), the muffled heart, the fillings and other dental adventures, the notes to self, the notes that are to, the notes awaying and hey and ho and gentle looking-out-the-window-ness.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

vocal whipped topping

[Tool a Magazine · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent new book from Bernadette Mayer!