Language Is a Temptation: Bill DeNoylles reads July 4 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Artist Bill DeNoyelles reads July 4 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.

Bill DeNoyelles was born July 8, 1960 in Suffern, NY. He received his BFA from The School of Visual Arts, NYC in 1984. Shortly after graduation Bill became the personal assistant to Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Schuyler at the legendary Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan. It was also at this time that he co-founded/edited (with poet Phil Good) the magazine Blue Smoke, publishing New York School poets alongside Bolinas (CA) and Naropa (Boulder, CO) poets. A forerunner to the ‘zine craze of the 1990’s, the magazine was self published on the infamous United Artists AB Dick Mimeo machine and proved to be the last of its kind, folding after four issues. From 1987 – 1990 he was the personal and studio assistant to Mrs. Milton Avery in Bearsville, NY. Bill considers Bernadette Mayer the singular most important influence on his life as an artist and in 1993 accompanied her to Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado to assist in the presentation of her seminal, conceptual photographic work Memory.

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.