Language Is a Temptation: Urayoán Noel reads July 29 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Language Is a Temptation: poet, translator and critic Urayoán Noel reads July 29 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory. 

Urayoán Noel lives in the Bronx and teaches at NYU. He is the author of ten books, including In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa) and the forthcoming Transversal (Arizona) and 24/7. Obra poética escrita, 2000-2020 (Catafixia). His translations include Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry (Shearsman) by Pablo de Rokha, which was a finalist for the National Translation Award. 

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.