Language Is a Temptation: Jen Bervin reads July 3 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Poet and visual artist Jen Bervin reads July 3 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.

Jen Bervin’s contextual, research-driven practice delves into the visual, embodied aspects of language and precise, haptic qualities of textile materials through situated poetics. Her work is informed by material science, technology and craft and incorporates sculpture, video, installation, and book forms. Her collaborative work ranges from poems etched nanoscale in liquified silk to large-scale museum installations. It has been exhibited at University Galleries of ISU, Walker Art Center, MASS MoCA, Des Moines Art Center, The University of Hong Kong, The Power Plant, Toronto, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, and can be found in thirty international collections including The J. Paul Getty Museum. She has published eleven artist book and trade publications, including Silk Poems, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems. Bervin’s work has been supported by Creative Capital, Rauschenberg Residency, Asian Cultural Council, SETI Institute and others.

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.