Language Is a Temptation: Ann Stephenson reads July 11 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Poet and small press editor Ann Stephenson reads July 11 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.

Ann Stephenson’s publications include Adventure Club, The Poles, and Wirework. Some of her poems have appeared in Across the Margin, The Brooklyn Rail, The Delineator, Folder, Ladowich, The Recluse, and Sal Mimeo, among others – as well as the anthology Like Musical Instruments: 83 Contemporary American Poets by John Sarsgard and Larry Fagin. She is the editor of Tent Editions, which recently released John Godfrey’s Nifty Walls. She received her MFA from Bard College in 2007, and was the recipient of a 2017 NYFA Artists’ Fellowship in Poetry. She was born and raised in Georgia and lives and works in New York City.

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.