Language Is a Temptation: Stephen Motika reads July 21 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Language Is a Temptation: poet and publisher Stephen Motika reads July 21 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.

Stephen Motika is the Director & Publisher of Nightboat Books. He was for many years on the staff of Poets House in New York City. The author of the poetry collection Western Practice (2012) and the poetry chapbooks Arrival and At Mono (2007), In the Madrones (2011), and Private Archive (2016), he is the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (2009) and co-editor of Dear Kathleen: On the Occasion of Kathleen Fraser’s 80th Birthday (2017).

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.