Language Is a Temptation: Rona Cran reads July 13 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Language Is a Temptation: author, scholar and lecturer Rona Cran reads July 13 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.

Rona Cran is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American Literature at the University of Birmingham, and Director of the University’s Centre for American and Canadian Studies. Her research and teaching centres on the literature and culture of New York City, queer writing, and modern American poetry. She is the author of Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan. She is currently writing her second book, tentatively titled Multiple Voices: New York City Poetry, 1960-1995, which explores the relationship between poetry and resistance from the counterculture to the AIDS crisis.

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.