Midwinter Day (Mayer)

 

 

The name of the poet Bernadette Mayer has come to my attention several times over the years. Several years ago, for example, I ran across her listing of prompts for writing that has become something of a classic. More recently I read Rivka Galchen's piece in the New Yorker this December in which surveyed Mayer's career (she passed away in November of this year) and mentioned Mayer's book Midwinter Day, which I was able to find at my local library and started reading on December 20. Midwinter Day is a book-length poem, written about one day in her life, December 22, 1978, the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of 1978. (She maintains that she wrote the entire book on that day as well, which seems on the face of it to be a physical impossibility, given the elaborate details of her rendering of not only what was going on around her, but what was going on in her mind as she considered each bit of incoming data. How she could have been experiencing all of that while she was writing is beyond me. But she says that's what she did.)

Midwinter Day divided into six sections, each of which takes us through one chunk of that day: her dreams as she's waking up, the morning she spends in her home with her husband and two children, and so on through the day. As it happened, I wound up reading the middle part of the book about December 22 on December 22. Much of the book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that seems to owe something to both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. There is a kind of manic omnidirectional energy in the poem, which keeps shifting in shape and in focus its attempt embrace everything going on around her and in her mind simultaneously. As might be expected in an experimental work of this kind, some of the passages are more reader-friendly than others. What I found most interesting were the instances in which she puts together inventories, some of which continue for four and five pages at a time. This passage, for example, gives an impressionistic rendition of her observations as she begins moving about her house in the morning:

From the bedroom, curtains blue as ink I stare at, red Godard floor white walls all crayoned, from the bed raised on cinder blocks at Dr. Incao's midwife's request so Sophia could be born, fake Indian cover Ray gave us for Marie American Indian and Ray's old real wool blanket and all our sheets her gifts,  Lewis' Aunt Fanny's crocheted afghan and Tom's old sleeping bag, the mimeograph machine and its cover, diaper rash ointment, from the walls a butterfly kite, a leaf on a ribbon from nursery school, mushrooms by Joe, an iris and a gladiola by Rosemary, the gladiola painted here, the stuck clock, the window faces south, laundry on it, closet doors hung with jackets, shawls, scarves and Marie's dress, closet floor boots shoes boxes bags baby carriers and my broken inherited chair, that's the airport, closet of stuff, carpet sweeper, another broken chair,from there I go to the kitchen sink you can sit on at the imagined forest window, two coleus plants too cold today, now a Wandering Jew, two related spider plants one is hanging, stones dead branches and collected pine cones, and old ghost and a Boston fern on the spooky refrigerator in which is the food, drawings of attempted faces by Marie that look like Cy Twombly, the dumb electric stove, George's red shirt calendar, soon it'll be over, the Lenox Savings Bank historical calendar, Pilgrims landed yesterday, winter begins today, shortest day of the year, Lewis and Harris with Marie in a Bronx corridor, little light, the African woman backpacking a baby, she's talking to a totem figure, a street scene by Rafael and a German altarpiece Rosemary sent, a crude drawing of a nude woman by Paul, a poster of a panda on the door to the former pantry now a house for two heaters one for air and one for water and the vents ducts and pipes for each, old flowerpots, the hall to the door to the hall, full of boxes of Angel Hair books, the broken bassinet now a toybox with turtles and cups in it, a small space full of brown paper bags and cardboard six-pack wrappers, broom, dishes and pots, fruit on the hood of the stove, bottles and jars, teas and books, medicines foods and detergents, binoculars, the dishwasher, vinegar, garbage, Lewis' mother's old Scotch kooler, spices, another of George's plaid shirts, coats on hooks, a red tray; to the deadpan bathroom, a woman by Matisse in yellow and blue and an ordinary mercator projection of the world, potty chair, diaper pail for cloth diapers, plastic bag of used plastic diapers, toilet sink tub, bath toys an alligator that swims mechanically and a shark with teeth that is a mitt and a sponge, hideous old curling rug lying in the tub after yesterday's flood, hooks on the back of the door, layers of clothing hanging on them, a mirror, ointments and pills, razors poisons and soaps, shower curtains; to the main room the living room, two leaping goldfish, cornflower plant, jade tree, Wandering Jew not doing too well, another spider offshoot, purple weed I don't know the name of accidentally growing in a pot of sedum, Christmas tree fern with a sense of humor, whiskey, the main collapsing table covered with things, rocking chair, small wearing rug on the golden wood floor, two couches with things on them, public school chairs with arms for principals at table, shelves of books and books in boxes, boxes of paper and stencils, two ring binders of photos since Worthington, my desk I steer and things, a standing lamp Nancy got us, a jacket by Joe and a blue shirt by George, a flower by Rosemary I don't remember the name of, a water color of a drapery by Rosemary done in Worthington, a drawing of Ted by Joe, a photo of Lewis by Gerard, pictures of the window out Main Street in different seasons, Main Street and Cliffwood Street, Our Lady of Perpetual Help-butterfly collage by Joe, a slinky male figure by Joe, a watch by George, some Kirschwasser, dead files and dead flies, magazines and library books, toys and balls, a stereo, four windows and the more frequent door. (32)

I'm sure some readers would find a passage of this kind to be exhausting, but I find it exhilarating, in terms of both its execution and its ambition. She comes closest to defining that ambition herself in this passage from later in the book:

I had an idea to write a book that would translate the detail of thought from a day to language like a dream transformed to read as it does, everything, a book that would end before it started in time to prove the day like the dream has everything in it, to do this without remembering like a dream inciting writing continuously for as long as you can stand up till you fall down like in a story to show and possess everything we know because having it all at once is performing a magical service for survival by the use of the mind like memory. (89)

 

I like the way Mayer pushes the boundaries of the sentence in a way that mirrors more accurately than traditional syntax the way the mind actually moves and makes connections in the moments of everyday life. It seems to me to be indeed "a magical service for survival by the use of the mind."

At the very end of the book Mayer employs a more traditional poetic form and diction to bring the poem, and the day to close with a praise song of sorts:

From dreams I made sentences, then what I’ve seen today, 

Then past the past of afternoons of stories like memory 

To seeing as a plain introduction to modes of love and reason, 

Then to end I guess with love, a method, to this winter season 

Now I’ve said this love it’s all I can remember 

Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December 

 

Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light 

That takes the bite from winter weather 

And weaves the random cloth of life together 

And drives away the long black night!

 

There are people who make it a point to re-read Midwinter Day every year in mid-December. I'm planning to be one of them. It turns out that in recent years there has also been an annual oral reading of the entire book that has been filmed and is available on youTube. There are lots of other resources available about the book as well, for example here and here.



 

Essay

 

 

 

Essay

A place to begin. An undertaking. An attempt at con-
        struction, picking up pieces, turning them this way

    and that. Squinting, weighing, wondering

         whether this one goes here or
                    there.

                                             How do we de-
        cide? Slowly something takes shape, a song

  insists on being sung. One voice, another, eventually, a choir.
                    A cathedral. Vocational

            therapy. We're in this together, we

        gather, we lean on
                    each other. We wander. We stand tall,

       we call out, we await the arrival
                    of the eyes

                       that, falling upon us, bring us,

                                            ever so briefly, to life.

 

 

Process Reflection:

Most people, hearing the word "essay," don't necessarily think about its derivation, the sense of the word that means "a trial" or "an attempt." But every work of art, and of writing, is in that most elemental sense an essay. The collage at the top of the page, entitled "Essay" is one of literally hundreds that I have worked on in recent years. The poem, a very "wet" recent draft with the same title, is an attempt both to generate some words about the collage and to mirror in its structure some of the observable elements of its architecture: the way in which disparate fragments and pieces come together, or, insisting on their unique individuality, resist coming together. One critical difference between the two "essays" is that the pieces of the collage, once glued down, are immovable, whereas the poem, now in its fifth or sixth incarnation, is subject to as many re-visions as I have the time and the patience to attempt.

           

 

 

Julie Carr: Noun Poem

 

 

Often when I run across a poem that interests me, either in a book from the library or online, I will go one what amounts to an online scavenger hunt, looking for other poems by the same poet or for interviews where the poet talks about what goes on in their head when they sit down to write. Very often this kind of online investigation leads me to blogs curated by other readers who share my interests and enthusiasms with regard to writing, and often in those blogs there is a sidebar with links to other poems and poets.

It was in just such a manner that I ran across Julie Carr. I was reading an essay written by Renee Gladman in which she referenced Carr, so I followed the breadcrumbs and wound up reading a number of poems by Carr, which I found interesting precisely because they challenged my sense of what a poem might be, how it might be read, and what sort of "sense" it might be said to be making.

I'd like to share one such poem, published in the Denver Post, and try to unpack some of what has gone on in my mind as I have read and re-read it. I can't claim to have any special insight or expertise, either in regard to this poem or to Carr's work in general, most of which I have not yet read. And yet this poem does engage my interest. I know that there are some readers who find it hard to relate to art or poetry which is nonrepresentational. I'm not one of those readers. I am actually really interested in the question of what happens when you take a literal medium and remove the literality. What is a drawing if it is not a drawing of something I can point to? What is a poem if it is not a poem about something I can point to? I am actually most drawn to artwork and poetry which explores the in-between spaces: work which is neither entirely literal nor entirely abstract. This one, for example:

Noun Poem


A man in need of a bird of yarn

enters a town with two suns

The bird unwinds its tale of read

in which a woman paints a postcard for her son

This is a sentence with two nouns

One is the noun we all know

the other will be formed of the wealth of the first:

a widower in search of a bride

Yes? I am thirsty, he says with laden head,

can I have a glass of milk, Mom?

She fills him a glass and watches him drink

the brush poised in her hand

The bird and boy whistle one to the other

red spooling from incongruous mouths

This is a song with two swallows

The other gathers others in the skies

This, a sentence with two eyes

One sits within his like an egg in a nest

the last spills as it mates, as it cries

 

The first thing that catches my attention, unsurprisingly, is the title, which immediately suggests that what will be foregrounded in this poem will be the kinds of words it uses, as opposed to the kind of meaning it makes. The first two lines confirm that suspicion:

A man in need of a bird of yarn
enters a town with two suns...

Having been nudged by the title, I am sensitized to the sequencing of the five nouns in the first two lines. And what I am more or less forced to notice in those two lines is that there's a kind of syntactic instability in play. Even though the words are all simple, familiar, one-syllable words (other than "enter" which is two, but still) that I recognize and understand, there's something odd about the phrasing. What is "a bird of yarn," for example? Is it a bird made out of spun wool? Or a bird in a story (yarn)? Or a bird of legend? All of the above? None of the above? And why would a man be in need of one? Carr is putting words together in such a way as to work against the part of my brain that wants to just read the poem and "get it." The third line does the same kind of work:

The bird unwinds its tale of read

The word "unwinds" suggests that maybe we are talking about a ball of yarn after all. But to speak of unwinding a "tale of read" suggests, in an oblique way, not only the the unspooling of yarn, but of a yarn (a story), or even perhaps of the very poem we are reading, as it "unwinds its tale of read."

So my sense is that there is a certain amount of playful misdirection going on here. The poem is unfolding, but is doing so in a way resists easy paraphrase, and encourages us to consider multiple possible readings simultaneously.

I'm going to resist the temptation to indulge in a line-by-line analysis of the syntactical shifts in the poem and the various possibilities that they present to me as I read, which would likely be as laborious for you to read as it would be for me to write. But I do want to make note of a couple of features of the poem which might not be obvious on first reading but become more so the longer we stay with it.

There are three places in which an assertion is in the poem made about the poem: "This is a sentence with two nouns," is the first, and later, "This, a sentence with two eyes." And in the middle of those two assertions, "This is a song with two swallows." I note first of all that are three assertions include doublings: two nouns, two eyes, two swallows. Once I've noted that, I notice other doublings throughout the poem: a man and a woman, a woman and her son, a bird and a boy whistling to each other, and finally  the two eyes at the end of the poem: one in apparent contentment in its nest, the other shedding what I take to be tears:

One sits within his like an egg in a nest
the last spills as it mates, as it cries

The piece that I've skipped over in that sequence is perhaps the most important for me in terms of how I construct the poem in my mind as I read. It's the middle assertion: This is a song with two swallows. And it is precisely this phrasing that snaps the whole poem into focus for me. It's a song. It is asking to be read as a sequence of words that make a certain kind of music. And once that is brought to the forefront of my consciousness, I see it everywhere. Re-reading, for example, those first two lines: A man in need of a bird of yarn enters a town with two suns. Put aside for a moment the question of what it might mean. Listen to the echoes there, the consonants: man, yarn, town, sun; need, bird; enters, town, two. These combinations and permutations of sound continue throughout the poem: a woman paints a postcard; a bird and a boy whistle one to the other; This a sentence with two eyes; spills as it mates, as it cries. If this poem were read out loud to a listener who had no English, they'd still hear its music.

But although this poem presents itself in some ways as an exercise in sound and syntax, it is also a narrative poem of a sort. There's a cast of characters in action in a landscape or series of landscapes: a man and a bird in a town with two suns, a woman painting a postcard and watching her son drinking milk and whistling with the bird "red spooling from incongruous mouths." Which I have to say is belatedly becoming my favorite line in the poem. And finally, surprisingly, the two eyes at the end, each living its own story.

I've read the poem maybe twenty times now and it's starting to cohere in my mind. I don't feel the need to have all of the elements here line up and make logical sense. The narrative makes the sense that it makes. The words make the music that they make. I find the poem to be curious and rich and, well, astonishing.

Process Reflection

 

 Every Tuesday for the last five weeks I've posted something here that I knew in advance that I wanted to write about. In each case it was about something or somebody I had been reading (Renee Gladman, Mark Strand). I had a number of motivations for doing so. One was simply that I had gotten out of the habit of posting to Throughlines, but was not yet ready to give it up, so I figured I'd better get myself together and try to jump start it. I have learned from long experience that I work well, or at least better, when I am working to a deadline, either one set for me or one I set one for myself. So I made a preliminary decision, after my first Tuesday post, that I would put something up each Tuesday for as long as I was able to keep that up. So now I'm writing this on Monday December 9, and what you are reading at this moment is the byproduct of that subtle pressure building up: what I am going to have ready to post tomorrow?

A second reason for posting was that as a retired English teacher I find it hard to get out of the habit of talking up writers whose work I admire. It's my hope that at least once in a while someone might read about a writer here and be encouraged to go out and read that author on their own. I once read someone's snarky description of a well-known poetry critic as being a "bobbysoxer for the poets that she swoons over." I thought to myself at the time, Well, what's wrong with that? There are of course legitimate differences in how individual readers will respond to individual writers. The question of what is good and what is not good in any of the arts is always up for debate. But as a matter of principle I am more inclined to respect those who speak up on behalf of what they like—even if I am unconvinced by their observations—than those who seem to take pleasure in ripping others to shreds.

The third reason—and in my mind the most important—is one I have often written about before. Writing about what I read is for me a generative act: it helps me to better understand what I have read, and, on good days, to work my way into thoughts and realizations that I would not otherwise ever have arrived at. And now that I find myself well into my seventies, it serves the additional function of imprinting in my mind the essence of what I am taking away from the reading. I find at my age that when I don't write about what I have read, it fades much more quickly from my mind. That's always been the case; it's more so now. In recent years I have on more than one occasion found myself halfway through a "new" book saying to myself, "Wait a minute. I think I read this book already." Books I have taken the time to write about, however, tend to stay with me.

The same logic applies, of course, to writing more generally: writing about our experiences, writing about what we believe, writing about our dreams, writing about people we know, writing about our pet peeves, writing about what's wrong and how to fix it. So much of what we experience every day is subliminal, below the threshold of perception. We may be scarcely aware of what we actually do think unless we make it a point of practice to spell it out for ourselves. That's why I'm here today, and why I am planning to have something to post next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that. Given the world that we live in and its many distractions, it's easy enough to fall off the wagon, and I supposed at some point I will do that. Until I re-booted myself this November, I had gone sixteen months without posting anything to Throughlines. It's not that I wasn't writing, it's just that I was not posting any of it here. And I've come to miss that.

It's not that I'm under any illusions about failing my legions of followers. No one is going to suffer any intellectual or spiritual impoverishment in the absence of my reports from the field. The only person to whom this enterprise is truly essential is me. So here I am. It's good to be back.