Language Is a Temptation: Olivier Brossard reads July 16 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Language Is a Temptation: educator, translator and editor Olivier Brossard reads July 16 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

A member of the Institut Universitaire de France, Olivier Brossard is Associate Professor of American literature at Université Gustave Eiffel where he runs the Poets and Critics program with Vincent Broqua and Abigail Lang. In 2000, he co-founded the Double Change collective, an online magazine and reading series in Paris. Olivier Brossard is joca seria éditions American poetry series editor: his most recent translation is John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, in collaboration with Pierre Alferi and Marc Chénetier (joca seria, 2020).

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.