Language Is a Temptation: Fanny Howe reads July 22 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Language Is a Temptation: poet Fanny Howe reads July 22 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.

Fanny Howe was born in Buffalo, New York. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, and several novels. Her recent collections of poetry include Second Childhood (Graywolf, 2014), and Come and See (Graywolf, 2011). Howe was the recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, and the California Council for the Arts. She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute and MacArthur. She was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005. She has lectured in creative writing at Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently a professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego.

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.