Language Is a Temptation: Greg Masters reads July 12 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Poet and musician Greg Masters reads July 12 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.

When he arrived in Manhattan’s East Village in the mid-1970s, Greg Masters pounded rock and roll drums in basement dives, “alternative” spaces, CBGB and Irving Plaza and attended readings and workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He co-edited the poetry magazine Mag City from 1977-1985. In 1977-78, along with a crew of poet comrades, he produced a cable TV show, Public Access Poetry. From 1980-83, he edited the Poetry Project Newsletter. Over the last eight years, he has published eight books with Crony Books, including At Maureen, a double journal written with Bernadette Mayer.

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.