Bernadette
Mayer’s Mutual Aid is a difficult book to access. I transcribed the copy
at the New York Public Library for my records many years ago. It has a blue cover
and looks homemade. You might read the lines above from the poem “Concluding
Unscientific Postscript” and immediately think: Kierkegaard, Hegel,
pseudonymous authorship, and alter egos (“by all that’s kind”). You might notice
the references to altered states (“a natural helper,” “the joint we share”). Or,
like me, you might read “a valuable book falls sophistically to floor” and
think of the interplay between “valuable” and “sophistically” until it brings
you to something like Lee Lozano’s intense, empirical note-taking practice,
which at times renders explicit its challenge to the culture of book-based
knowledge acquisition: “Do I want to study from books as weapon to use when
participating in world? Or do I want to search for new knowledge/info
systems, invent other ways of learning for myself?”[1]
The falling book’s action is to floor, which all at once might mean to reject,
to bewilder, to stun, to strike, or even to flower. The order of events is not
clear. “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” like so much of Bernadette Mayer’s
writing, extensively layers meaning beyond its obvious source texts or formal
constraints.
I have
a slightly different relationship to these lines, however. I took them out of the
context of the poem, and I memorized them. Otherwise, they might read quite a
bit differently. (The poem begins “The pluralistic yellows of fall’s sun /
Scare the wits out of me and my daughters,” and the lines in the excerpt get
immediately reframed by what’s next: “Like the fooling afterthought of a
notorious well-wisher / Like glass might know what its warmer heart did not”). I
treat the excerpt as an invocation. It often runs through my mind when I feel particularly
enthusiastic about a project or particularly frustrated with one. My writing
projects position scientific practices within everyday routines, so when I
recite these lines, I sometimes imagine myself to be addressing an abstract,
looming, vaguely anthropomorphic entity associated with science. I am
Kristen, and I am Science. Anyone who knows me could probably hear how I
would intone these lines, correctly inferring that this practice plays out in a
manner that is both totally serious and totally ridiculous. I know this. I
don’t really seek divine intervention or the materialization of actual help. I don’t
try to be everywhere and nowhere. I offer myself when I think these
lines, and I occasionally take off into even more specificity relative to the
situation in front of me. I will write only what I know empirically, I
think to myself. But I will go beyond the sensible. That is, I let the
invocation remind me that my primary writing interest is almost never located
in the human world. Rather, I am more interested in devising methods for exploring
sensation and feeling beyond human experience (“against / the wishes of
everyone sensible,” “I would be more well”). This writing practice that mixes
ritual, curiosity, dailiness, impossibility, experiment, idealism, ecology, and
reverence for a never-quite-specified everyday science might sound odd or
conflicted, but I would like to place it—along with the poem excerpt above—in
another context. I was once a student of Bernadette Mayer.
***
In
the fall of 2008, I found an advertisement for weekend poetry workshops with
Bernadette. I can’t remember exactly where I found it, but it might have been
in a Poetry Project newsletter. I sent a message to the email address on the ad
and asked—Bernadette and her partner Philip Good directly, it turned out—if I
could attend one of these workshops at their home in Upstate New York. I was
not a poet then. I do not consider myself to be a poet now. I was in graduate
school at NYU and living in downtown Manhattan at the time, and I had just read
Moving, Memory, Studying Hunger, Proper Name, and The
Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, as well as many documents
in Bernadette’s archives. I was taken with what I understood to be one of the
implicit challenges issued by her work: to write continuously and breathlessly while
lifting long sentences with phrase after phrase. I was fascinated with the way
she took science and self-experiment seriously in her projects, though I didn’t
have any clear sense of what that might mean at the time. I just wanted to learn
how to write about everyday life in a new way.
Phil
responded to my email graciously and asked when I would like to visit. Early
November sounded great, we decided. He asked me to send some poems ahead of
time, and I didn’t have any, but I wrote a few and put them in the mail. I
remember writing something on the twin paradox. On November 7th, I
took the train to the stop in Albany, where Phil picked me up at the station. As
we were chatting on the way back to the house, I asked if everyone else had already
arrived. Phil responded that I was the only student visiting for the weekend. I
tried to process this information without revealing that it had completely short-circuited
my brain. I had not planned to be a center of attention. And I didn’t have a
lot of time to reorient myself. When we pulled up to the house, Bernadette
was smoking on the front porch, waiting for me. She was ready to discuss my
poems.
I
didn’t go to graduate school to study poetry or to learn how to write it. I wanted
to study the scientific revolution, eighteenth-century amatory fiction, and Eliza
Haywood. I particularly liked Love in Excess and Epistles for the
Ladies. Above all, though, I wanted to learn how to think in a new way, and
I was at a crossroads when I visited Bernadette and Phil. I was contemplating a
switch in the trajectory of my studies to postwar and contemporary poetry. In
the previous school year, I took a poetry class on a whim and ended up reading
Bernadette’s prose poem Moving. I had never read anything like it before.
In the special collections at NYU, I found a typescript for Moving that
had been misfiled with letters in the Angel Hair archive along with some
materials that evidenced how Bernadette put the book together. With guidance
that I appreciated, I began to contemplate Bernadette’s influence and her
reception as a writer. If I were to retrospectively position the visit to her
home into that narrative—that is, to do something akin to mistaking lab
notebook writing for a published report—then I would say I took the project of rethinking
her reception very seriously. I went straight to the source. Here was this poet
with a renowned writing practice, and there I was with an opportunity to get to
know her as a person and a teacher.
The
poems I sent to Bernadette were all practice-based responses to Moving (wr.
1969-70; pub. 1971), a book-length prose poem and collage work that is also ostensibly
a protest poem. Bernadette describes her process by
saying she was “only writing
when I absolutely felt compelled” and “from somewhere other than self.”[2] The
children’s
geology primer The How and Why Wonder Book of Our Earth is the book’s
most significant structuring device. Returning to fundamentals and working
within the structure of the primer, she intersperses stories of a recognizably
autobiographical “I” (or “B” or “b”) with materials from other sources,
including solicited poems from friends (marked as speech), clips of
unattributed conversation, newspaper articles, recipes, gossip, and
appropriated material from science and technology reference books. Helpfully and amusingly for someone trying to get a sense
of how the book works, the appropriated material includes significant excerpts
from an illustrated encyclopedia called The Way Things Work. The
contextualized deformation of the book’s main structuring device is the central
conceit. That is, Bernadette and her social group
naïvely infiltrate the “our” in Our Earth with
their quotidian activities, eroding the organizing structure, changing
language, and essentially changing the world. The expressive
possibilities of everyday language transform along with the conditions for that
expression.
I was immediately
drawn to the way Moving openly exposes the seams of its construction
throughout. It not only layers temporal scales but also shows the reader how
those scales become equivalent in the context of the work. A week or so of
Bernadette’s daily life becomes equivalent to the entire history of the world.
Considered another way, a weekend of writing poems with Bernadette could be
equivalent to an interglacial age, a pedagogical experience extending across
many years, or the time it takes to read a sentence or a novel. Much later, I
would draw a line from Bernadette’s Moving to Clark Coolidge’s Quartz
Hearts and Own Face and then onward to a geology of everyday life,
index fossils of the present, my own genuine interest in the nonhuman world,
and a years-long grappling with Raymond Ruyer’s philosophy in The Genesis of
Living Forms and Neofinalism in search of embodiable forms of
force-activated transformation oriented toward repair. As esoteric as that
project trajectory might sound, I think about its key tenets—perpetual motion,
radical empathy, changing language—manifesting in the beloved image of my
grandfather, a physician whose athletic rounding style and devotion to the
difficult work of care was so distinctive that his colleagues would say they
were going to take the “Billy Oaks elevator” and would mean, of course, the
stairs.
As we sat together
on the porch and discussed my poems, Bernadette asked me thoughtful questions
about my process. I was mostly quiet, but I did my best to explain my thinking,
and I asked her some questions too. She
noticed that I was instinctively trying to get away from writing about myself
and the body of knowledge already familiar to me, though at that point I was really
only writing about myself. I am projecting a little bit into the memory here,
but I felt encouraged to stay with science and to keep thinking about
transforming its storytelling possibilities. My homework assignment was to
“write a metaphor in dactyls on neutrinos.” I was not able to do anything
interesting with the assignment at the time, but I do think it contributed
somewhat to the way I thought about bringing the human and nonhuman worlds
together on the page. She gave me a folder that contained her experiments list,
and over the course of the weekend we worked through some of the prompts,
alternating between quiet writing periods and discussion. She quickly figured
out that it would help me to move beyond my usual syntax, so I wrote several
cut-up poems. I would later incorporate a significant amount of cut-up into my
writing practice as a way of working through in-process thinking.
When Bernadette
speaks of her practice, she does so in straightforward terms. In a 2007
interview, for example, Charles Bernstein points out that her work explores
“the way writing relates to states of consciousness” and asks her what state of
consciousness one must achieve while writing. “You have to be a truth teller,”
she replies. “You have to be a kindly person. Politically, I think you’d be
totally on top of things. Be an anarchist.”[3]
Although her writing practice is certainly multifaceted and irreducibly complex,
she does at times explicitly connect her work, and especially her book-length
projects, to science. Memory is an experiment. Studying Hunger is an experiment. In the preface to Studying Hunger, she describes
her process as “emotional science.” Several years later, in a letter in Desires
titled “Pursued as She Stumbled about You It Could Signify Nothing,” she
presents experimental writing as a discovery process linked to speech: “So
thus I could find out in the talking
from the words what thoughts were because I couldn’t find out from my silence
truthful as it seemed … So I got the habit
that way to experiment. To, like the other Alice, see what I would say.”[4]
When I first started reading her letters and journals, I found the prospect of
anarchic self-experimental writing—chaotic, up-to-the-minute truth-telling
endeavors operating in vaguely scientific terms—to be absolutely thrilling. What
would turn out to be true?
I ended
up sharing a lot of objectively bad writing with Bernadette. Still, I never
felt judged for it. She found things to praise. I tend to be stubborn about rewriting
the same thing repeatedly until I can finally see something in the writing that
might be immediately obvious to others on a first pass. I often need a nudge to
step back to see the big picture—and how that big picture might change in
relation to my tendency to get tangled in the details. That said, I do think I
have to find a way to embody a concept in order to understand it, and the way that
embodiment manifests itself establishes key terms for knowing. Working with
Bernadette for the weekend made visible to me a pedagogical model of
co-creation and attention to process that I have continued to develop and draw
upon in the work I now do with my own students. My students are extremely
perceptive, though; I can’t hide my methods from them. For a recent “thick
description” assignment based on Sharon Traweek’s Beamtimes and Lifetimes,
for example, I invited a group of BioArt students to explore our laboratory space
as well as the biology building and the surrounding environment, hoping they would
acquaint themselves with our strange, social, and somewhat expansive concept of
classroom space while also honing their descriptive and observational writing
skills. One clever student described not only the lab but also the person in
the lab who wrote the assignment. Based on just a few classes and meetings, she
was able to concisely articulate an impressively accurate description of my
writing practice and teaching style: “Kristen Tapson; attempts to dissect a
concept until finding way back to self, see ‘Droste effect.’”[5]
Occasional
poetry can be like thick description—at least the way I present it to my students.
When I visited Bernadette, though, I had never written that kind of poetry
before. On Sunday morning, Bernadette and I wrote occasional poems. I had her
experiments list to guide me, so it was also a lesson:
Write occasional poems for weddings, for rivers, for birthdays, for other poets’ beauty, for movie stars maybe, for the anniversaries of all kinds of loving meetings, for births, for moments of knowledge, for deaths. Writing for the “occasion” is part of our purpose as poets in being—this is our work in the community wherein we belong and work as speakers for others.
I remember
writing a poem that could be charitably described as a confusing Hallmark card.
But Bernadette wrote something special for me. Using my first and last name, she
wrote a double acrostic poem. It was both a very serious poem and a not very
serious poem at the same time. I was immediately intrigued by the form.
When
Bernadette read the poem to me, I thought it sounded like a prophecy. Of
course, I knew better. Its purpose, as I understood it, was to encourage a young
writer while also demonstrating that writing an occasional poem need not be
more than an act of honoring the strange particularity of the exact moment of
writing. I would assume she has written similar poems for friends and other
students, but I really appreciated the aspects of the poem that felt personal:
she knew I loved Moving (“Grace has been to London & Loch Ness”),
she knew I was interested in science, and she knew I was observing her a little
bit. Given Bernadette’s attention to fixing typos, “cpious” seems to have been
a fortuitous mistake or an intentionally playful spelling. It certainly works
well in the context of the poem and with the meaning of my name. (“Copious
knowledge” would not have worked so well for me, as I’m sure I mentioned
or demonstrated at some point). When she realized she had spelled my name incorrectly,
she invited me to rewrite the line. It would be better that way, she told me,
because the poem would become a collaboration.
In the
rare instance I have mentioned this poem to anyone, I have joked that Bernadette
set a high bar for anyone who might ever feel motivated to write any sort of occasional
poetry for me. Having this kind of formative writing experience certainly contributed
to my sense of writing’s capacity to function as a caretaking practice, a
sign-sharing practice, and a way of lovingly marking significant moments or
discoveries. In other words, just to go a little further with this (admittedly
extreme) act of overreading a quickly composed poem, one might say that on this
occasion, Kristen was doing her best to live [inattenT] / In the middle
of nowhere near corpus christi while Bernadette observed carefully, In
a tent / In the middle of nowhere near corpus christi. Knowing that
this project would require Kristen to do some dedicated observational work,
though, Bernadette would play along sometimes and allow herself the pleasure of
being inattent[ive] too. Also, it was lunchtime.
Bernadette’s
openness, playfulness, and generosity made an impression on me. She asked me questions
about my family and entertained me with random musings. She told me stories
about her childhood and her experiences in Catholic school. I won’t allude to any
of those stories here, as I’m not sure which ones she felt comfortable sharing publicly.
In the intimate space of her home, she seemed unguarded. And in that
environment, I felt comfortable sharing a lot about myself. I also relayed some
harmless gossip about the NYU scene (i.e., poetry readings I had attended,
whose writing I knew well, who was writing about her work, etc.) and asked
questions about how to develop my writing practice. I have a vague memory of striking
upon a topic that intrigued both of us and I was touched when she responded
that we should write something about it together. I admitted to her that I was
too intimidated to collaborate. I wasn’t a poet. My writing was very clear. “No
problem,” she responded, without missing a beat. “We’ll write it, and then we
can give it to _______ and he can make it ununderstandable.” She gave me a
conspiratorial look. She had been listening to my random musings. There
was no meanness in this comment, only encouragement that I understood to be
directed toward me. I now use the word “ununderstandable” in an abundance of
contexts, and I always think of her when I do.
It
was probably evident to Bernadette and Phil that the amount of attention on my
writing stressed me out, so I appreciated the opportunity to immerse in
everyday routines too. They took me to a nearby alpaca farm on Saturday
afternoon, where we stood at the fence and talked about what it might be like
to be reborn as an alpaca. I remember Bernadette saying she thought it would be
cool. Later that night, Bernadette chose a movie
for us to watch: Until the End of the World. I think she chose the movie
because she knew I liked science fiction. I had never seen it. I had never seen
a Wim Wenders movie before. Until the End of the World is a road story starring
Solveig Dommartin and William Hurt that involves a car crash, a secret lab, self-experimentation,
dream recording, aliases, world travels, a bounty hunter, espionage, an
impending apocalypse, technology addiction, stolen money, the process of
writing a novel, a quest for a Nobel Prize, and an invention that allows the
blind to see. It’s a long movie, but I remember staying up late and talking to
Bernadette about it afterward. As she predicted, I really liked it.
Over that
weekend of writing poems, sharing meals, drinking beers, watching movies, and
visiting alpacas, I didn’t take any notes. I didn’t ask interview questions or document
events in any significant way. I did take one photo on my phone—a closeup while
I was wearing Bernadette’s green boots—as we were heading out for a walking
tour of the nature preserve just beyond her yard. Her boots were too big for
me, so I’m pretty sure I took the picture because I was quietly amusing myself
with the idiomatic or punny nonsense that is always passing through my head but
usually gets caught by the filter of better judgment before I say anything too silly.
(Hey Bernadette, it’s clear you have some big shoes to fill. Hey Bernadette, do
you think I’ll walk a mile in your shoes?)
I never
intended to publish anything about this visit to Bernadette’s house or to
circulate the poem she wrote for me. She had many students, and I merely passed
through her life for a few days. When I saw her in the city at poetry readings
in subsequent months, though, she warmly introduced me as her student and made space
for me in conversations. In
retrospect, I appreciate the leisurely writing pace of that weekend. I didn’t
know it at the time, but my life was about to change significantly. Just over a
year later, I would be pregnant with my first child and moving away from the
city. My writing life would become completely enmeshed with my family life for
a long time. Earlier this year, I recounted some
anecdotes from that weekend to Lee Ann Brown and Ann Vickery over lunch at a
conference as we were talking about experiences that shaped our writing. Their positive
responses convinced me that it would be a good idea to finally document these
memories. Plus, I was beginning to worry I would forget important details. Just before
Bernadette died, I decided to rewrite the line in my occasional poem, and the
private work to retroactively collaborate with her became the groundwork for this
essay. The writing process turned into a lengthy, associative, somewhat freewheeling
exercise. At first, it was a Moving-inspired reverie patched
together with borrowed source material, conversation snippets, memories, journal
notes, reading responses, and wanderings through the real-time experience of
writing. I was concomitantly reading Of Logic and the Theory of Science
and The Philosophy of No, rewatching Until the End of the World, and
attempting to tap into the thermodynamics of self-talk. I was also reading a
good bit of nonsense poetry. Then, it became an effort (following Bernadette)
to write the longest sentence I had ever written.[6]
***
the
corpus christi line
Sifting
thru her cpious knowledge, she seeS / That it’s obvious she should visit the
city just to say empirically I can tell this is not for me but
sometimes you are getting exactly what you want at the drive-thru window and
your mind wanders so you start to notice that there are lots of trees around
and then you lament that there’s also so much haughtiness in the world which
initiates an episode of mixed-up thinking so severe that suddenly everything’s
on the party line even though now you’re just trying to make conversation while
choosing milk in the refrigerated section of the grocery store so you might say
something profoundly foolish like remember when doug funnie had heart eyes
for patti mayonnaise but it also means hello on this aisle and it means I like
you and it’s cringey but it means shit I was digging that joke and it means I’m
talking about a dressing in a funny way and it means don’t forget condiments
and beef and it seems sort of childish now but it means I am imitating a
notorious well-wisher and an animated greeting card but if greeting is
also attacking in an etymological way I could hyperbolically swear off this
kind of real talk forever and start mumbling famous passages in literature to myself
in the critical sphere of love and be silent where I could show you how to build
a consentful world out of the discontinuous history of math’s non-progressive internal
necessity just as jean cavaillès showed me from a cell under a microscope under
unmentionable conditions till the training wheels come off my mixed metaphors
and I collapse on the stage in love’s light so please follow me but
know it will destroy me to see myself this way as I am running into a new
year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair so I will politely
ask you to become someone else while I get a little crazy and act like
bernadette mayer who wrote letters that diligent archivists will tell you are
worth reading in all kinds of contexts and the force of this identification
might cause the laws of the natural world to come crashing down at the feet of
a scientist doing an elegant critical experiment so that in an earlier era lee
lozano would feel compelled to write in her lab notebook that a saydist is
someone who talks too much and if you are able to write-speak far beyond what
you can possibly know then you’ve found a not-system that can begin anywhere
even an idyllic location somewhere near an alpaca farm right around lunchtime
where k balances a book on her head and repeats b’s boots are too big for me as
she takes her alliteration final and pursues the poetic finishing school degree
she’s after because sometimes important poets share signs with nobodies in
kindly acts of semiotic husbandry but before the end of lee’s note and k’s examination
a canvasser going door to door for an endangered species stops by to test out a
script that keeps repeating itself I am honored by your enthusiasm while
a well-dressed woman interrupts to add that you would really expect every
person in green fatigues to tell you they’re a good guy and in recent years
we’ve begun to learn that the universe might be less peaceful than we want to
think and things often happen by chance and are manifested as great disasters
and authority used for any other purpose than service leads to corruption so
the only way to deal with it all is to stand very still for an entire ice age
waiting for a butterfly to land on your shoulder just long enough to flap its
wings and break pangaea because we all know this is a lush fantasy and in some
cases 113 is the same as 74 and chaos and catastrophe become the rule and not
the exception especially when the clock is set to post-apocalypse and the
pressure is on for the last woman on earth but for now it’s memorial day
weekend and someone at physical therapy for dogs points to a golden retriever
and comments that she’s basically a puppy to which someone at home in grey
sweatpants replies solemnly that the time to really act out is when you no
longer need a letter of recommendation and also here’s a ring pop or a grenade
or the oddly sticky body of kristen placed gingerly in your hands in the
blasphemous communion story of lord killer who grew up on the isolation
playground reading babel-17 or else this is all an intrusive thought that
charli xcx should do a hyperpop cover of personal jesus which could be playing
in the background when someone presents themselves as a snow leopard at a celebratory
dinner even though they might actually be a goat and then you’re not sure
whether to feel safe because this isn’t animal twenty questions and everything
is starting to sound like a widely-used operating system with very high ratings
but confusingly the world is also filled with barnacles centipedes worms
mantids giant water bugs aphids weevils grasshoppers crustaceans katydids treehoppers
leafcutter ants eastern tent caterpillars orb-weaver spiders did you know
spiders balloon snails bumblebees sawflies scarabs roly-polies fleas monarchs
blow flies silverfish hornets polyphemus moths ladybugs click beetles crickets
and lots of birds like jays and yellow warblers and the list could go on and on
and on until an old car enthusiast exclaims not my road runner!
which is a b-body plymouth not a b-body dodge and some things are
ununderstandable outside of particular contexts but the missing artifacts of
another time can be sourced from an exclusive whatsapp thread on the subject of
wish rocks which is the scientific name for the ones with the circles around
them and all this means is that I see the world another way she said so they
took her to poetry school on the poetry school bus where she tried on a
letterman jacket enrolled in rocks for jocks and wrote a meandering sentence spanning
multiple geologic eras while they insisted she take strategic headshots to put
on the flyers for the book she was writing called what is a book and she
nodded as they took her picture and reviewed her sentence with no firsthand knowledge
of punctuation or the concrete forms a letter might take to be breathing cake
to be breathing dolphin to be breathing investments to be breathing prisoners
to be breathing all prisoners and then I confess to wondering what happened to
make this method so ungraspable as life yet to hold it there and take the whole
thing out of control like a pit viper or an unwieldy number of helium balloons and
you don’t have to say it I know it’s not intentional when there’s always a new stranger
to put my image in motion I guess you could say they’ll do what their mothers
did in other ways but my project is not a patchwork or a hive or even this
magna-tiles castle on a flickering light table it’s too attached to a preternatural
kindness that’s why I put dynamite in the mine lit the fuse and wouldn’t leave it
alone I know I punctured the earth just so I could have a moment to tell
someone who reminds someone else of you that you’re awfully smart and intrepid but
I’ve held monsters in abeyance every day in my antarctica for hundreds of years
with a teflon pan and an ill-fitting suit and I could’ve asked for more
resources but I thought I’d make snow angels all day for research instead it
was my choice and I’m not too proud to admit I didn’t expect to find myself occasionally
bored by dailiness or so utterly mesmerized by my own highs and humiliations yet
I won’t be critical of intensity when it’s such an honest pleasure to watch power
lines go out so whoever you are let’s decide quickly if we should
institutionalize this altruistic patrol that’s working now it’s senseless that
my agar plates were part of your experiment but maybe not and I wasn’t wrong when
I remembered everything like something about her pistol something about nominal
color codes flier arrangements and square pegs pleats do you even like science I
need something that overlooks me inexplicably to learn I am quite oblivious
even when I speak with the confident knowingness of a schoolchild learning pig
latin it’s just spectroscopy to show you this pattern of lines over here which means
someone is winding down after hours to admit with genuine cheerlessness that she only enjoys brandy as she sips it coolly from a limited edition baby shark
water bottle at a junior varsity soccer game where one of the characters
from before remains quiet and taps her foot till they call her drum and the
secret messaging service gives her a back to the future trapper keeper covered
in care bear stickers containing a hand-drawn map to the audition for the
school metonymy play where she graciously accepts the role of a white lotus
playing portia in a shakespearean remix with bows and flowers and a couple of state
forest set pieces leading her back to b’s house just quickly enough to catch
someone admitting that of course he was lying to the canvasser that
time when he was scared and said his mom was upstairs when she wasn’t and it
was all so emphatic that the canvasser thought he’d tripped some kind of
elaborate home security system installed after a break-in attempt which
prompts an animated film to play on a big screen once long ago a man of
science proposed a trip to the moon to a girl with a bug collection and she
said no what do bugs have to do with going to the moon whatareyouafraidofheaskednobodynocrime
but that was exactly what she was afraid of imnotaskingforthemoonandstarsshesaid
but this was a game of tag and the moon and stars were it and he followed her
around until she placed a recording device in the celestial outpost of the
department of the interior and in her long years of reciprocal observation she
became the nocturnal princess of swan lake which means her situation made her knowing
less evident while some people slept under warm quilts and other people appeared
in ugly sweater contests and everyone decorated the christmas tree while they
played dress up make believe guess who hungry hungry hippos d&d hearts candy
land fashion show chess busytown mysteries light brite operation sum swamp uno until
suddenly without warning or a proper goodbye there was no longer a place of
work for the practice of science and just in time because it’s beyoncé’s
renaissance and church girl is rewriting a familiar song in haute couture but
the clock stops in mid-august as someone insistently circles a needlepoint
pillow in a magazine that says what a time to be alive so it can be placed as a
gift on an extravagantly patterned swivel chair for girls whose parents might
quip that it’s very difficult when one of your children absorbs the weight of
the world while the other bobs along on the waves so one must remember to be
fair when one gets on the hook to help the local daisies make paper plate
medals to earn their courageous and strong petals because you want to make sure
they all grow up to live in norman rockwell paintings and pat benatar hits and
also to appreciate it or else a kid could end up becoming someone who brings
magic brownies to dumb ass barbecues or gives away big state secrets like that precogs
are real and operation acoustic kitty is still going and
the national academy funds a surprisingly particular study of everyone whose research
derailed while contemplating the grandeur of emil fischer and the group for
specialized tactics records dreams to please the united fucks department of
commerce clearinghouse for federal & scientific information and
the
agreed-upon vernacular of the dirty climatological report is actually
pornographic stick figures and all that’s legible on this torn policy memo
is look I have real shit to do and what’s the crystal ball say because
half a billion years ago there was no life at all on the land but just a few
weeks ago a meteor fell in missouri which contained enough of the acids to make
life appear anywhere even on the moon so yes it’s true that some people set
their sights on nobel prizes while other people get really into weird science just
as wandering pieces of space ice rock and metal prove we are finite and
coincidences are the rule in this universe and scientific method is fallible
but it’s our only reasoning scheme he said and logic is perfect by default and
mathematics is almost perfect and physical science is far from perfect and
someone said I don’t want to know everything for fear I will end up like the
old man and the young boy who lost their minds on the mountain peaks even
though it’s better to say I materialized in a laboratory rented from the
harvard special researches project and had to be taught the words for bed table
chair while they took my knife away from me but regardless of the path one
stumbles upon the consequences are naturally magnified when a diy biologist gives
an impassioned speech on the ethical implications of the gene gun which
brings everyone around to the understanding that these are complicated times so
it might make sense that some lady would reflexively throw up her hands and say
for the love of ununderstandability who are all these characters who
live in a tenT / In the middle of nowhere near corpus christI?
***
While I don’t know exactly
why, I ended up turning a statement into a question in an homage
sentence heading toward expansiveness. In theory, replacing an I-line with an
E-line should have been an easy swap, but it wasn’t as easy as I thought.
Reflecting on it now, I think I needed to find my way into the logic of the
poem in order to understand something important about it. Then, I tried to
carry the momentum of Bernadette’s line as far as I could possibly take it. In
the process, I wrote six new lines for the poem.
Sifting thru her
cpious knowledge, she seeS
That it’s obvious she
should live in a tenT
Every so often, in
commune with good naturE,
On Friday night,
Bernadette gave me a book called Dada to read in bed. She asked me to
write down as much as I could remember from my dreams as soon as I woke up. We
talked about them each morning over coffee.
Earnestly testing a
procedurE
She taught me how to
diagram sentences on Saturday afternoon while we shared a yogurt cup from the
alpaca farm. Then, I wrote a cut-up poem using a book on butterflies.
Ensnaring herself in
a practicE
Bernadette encouraged
me to learn poems by heart. Before we watched the movie on Saturday night, I
stacked firewood on the front porch.
Eating bugs at the
convention for matters of the eyE
She showed me her
library and gave me a copy of United Artists eighteen. I asked her which
poets she thought I should read closely, and she suggested Philip Whalen and
Clark Coolidge. She told me a story about making dinner for Philip Whalen when
he visited the Poetry Project.
Even in winter, for
revolutions of history and sciencE
On Sunday, Bernadette
and Phil invited me to stay another day and night, but I had to get back to the
city for a class on Monday. I was teaching Dorothy Wordsworth. We talked about Dorothy’s
journals in relation to William Wordsworth’s “Daffodils.”
Each day reworking
the aims of science’s square onE
The bus ride home was
cash only, and I only had a debit card. Bernadette and Phil paid my fare and
made sure I got home safely.
Not to observe, say,
lemurs but meN …
Before I boarded the
evening bus to go back to the city Bernadette
hugged me
She said
Be
good
[1] Lee Lozano, Private Book 8 (New
York: Hauser & Wirth, 2021), 113.
[2] Bernadette Mayer,
“From: A Lecture at the Naropa Institute, 1989,” Disembodied Poetics: Annals
of the Jack Kerouac School, Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, eds
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 97.
[4] Bernadette Mayer, The Desires of
Mothers to Please Others in Letters (West Stockbridge: Hard Press, 1994), 94.
[5] I would like
to acknowledge this student while also allowing her to preserve her anonymity.
So, student, I propose that we collectively refer to ourselves as Sir Vincent
Wigglesworth. Given that insects spark joy for both of us, I have no doubt you
will appreciate this characterization more.
[6] Unmarked
sources in the long sentence include Lucille Clifton’s An Ordinary Woman (1974),
Lee Lozano’s Private Book 5 (wr. 1969-70; ed. 1972), Bernadette Mayer’s
Moving (1971) and “A Non-Unified Theory of Love and Landlords” in Proper
Name & Other Stories (1992), and Joanna Russ’s “The View from
this Window” in The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987).
Kristen Tapson is a scholar-in-residence in the Department of Art, Art History &
Visual Studies at Duke University, where she is also an instructor in
Information Science + Studies. Most recently, she co-edited All This Thinking:
The Correspondence of Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge (University of New
Mexico Press, 2022). She lives in Durham, NC with her husband and three
children.
I
would like to thank Philip Good for supporting the publication of this essay.
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