Language is a Temptation: Daily Readings from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on a month long experiment: every day she exposed a roll of 35mm film and kept a journal. The result was a groundbreaking, conceptual work, comprised of more than 1100 photographs and two hundred pages of text. Mayer’s durational and constraint-based diaristic work of poetry and photography investigates the nature of memory: its surfaces, textures and material.

In July 2020, Poets House and Siglio Press embark on a month long daily experiment: a passage from the corresponding day in 1971 will be read by poets, writers, critics, and artists, as a parallel durational work that celebrates the new publication of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory (Siglio Press, 2020), which brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form.

Bernadette Mayer (b. 1945, Brooklyn, NY) is the author of over thirty books including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994), and most recently Work and Days (2016) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. In the art world, Mayer is best known for her collaboration with Vito Acconci as editors of the influential mimeographed magazine O TO 9.