Language Is a Temptation: Barbara Epler reads July 18 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Language Is a Temptation: publisher Barbara Epler reads July 18 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.

Barbara Epler joined New Directions as an editorial assistant after graduating from college in 1984. She became editor in chief in 1995; named Publisher in 2008, and in 2011 became president. Independent since 1936, New Directions is a for-profit press that brings out about 35 new books a year and maintains more than 1,300 titles on its backlist.

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.