Language Is a Temptation: Aldrin Valdez reads July 9 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Writer & visual artist Aldrin Valdez reads July 9 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.

Aldrin Valdez is a bakla writer & visual artist. They are the author of ESL or You Weren’t Here (Nightboat Books), selected as a 2019 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Poetry.

Language Is a Temptation is a series of 3 minute readings from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory that are posted on our Instagram, YouTube, and website daily at 3pm.

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.