Bernadette Mayer’s big works, Memory, Midwinter Day (New Directions republished this book), and The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters are in her past, but she remains true to her dream of poetry. Hers is the romantic dream that poetry is always becoming. Projects may end, but the upsurge of poetry, the feeling vital to write it, and she might say to live it, is ongoing. Mayer’s is not a well-made poetry if that term means poems with a high degree of finish, objects that delight in their precision and polish. Her poetry is a stream capable of carrying all manner of impulse. She has long loved the sonnet but has so blown open the form that she can put any sort of language and feeling into it.
In Poetry State Forest Mayer emphasizes her sense of humor, a silliness always present but not so dominant as it is here: “poetry is as good as chocolate / chocolate’s as good as poetry.” Well, of course it is and Mayer is not going to stop herself from saying so. This is a book of many impulses that result in nature poems, sonnet sequences, prose poems, epigrams, list poems, a conversation and even an old notebook presumably verbatim. Form has always had great appeal for Mayer, but she has always made up her own rules. Hers is a big forest, lots of tress, different trees, bushes, brambles and all manner of vegetation, wild and with paths through it. If there are giggles in her work there is also the grand chaos of life lived without plan or life responded to where imagination is the spur of the moment. Mayer is a poet whose antennae is on 24-7, alive to much that it’s hard for poetry to handle because a desire for order wants to filter out at least some of the mess of living. This has made her an excellent collaborator but before I say a few words about The Cave, a little more about Poetry State Forest.
Mayer is a public poet in the same sense that a state forest is open to the public. She believes that poetry can change lives and change the world. How can it be otherwise for someone for whom poetry has been at the center of her life for going on fifty years? Poetry State Forest is the Whitman’s Sampler Whitman might have written had he grown up in Mayer’s Brooklyn, adventured on the Lower East Side, run the Poetry Project, reared children, loved many man and woman and been freed his tongue to write such intimacies as he had known. Poetry State Forest exalts friendship and embraces “all the pitiful junks of life.”
Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer’s The Cave dates from 1972-78 (pertinent information is provided by Marcella Durand’s introduction) and concerns a visit to Eldon’s Cave in western Massachusetts and the collaborative poetry, dialogues and song that ensued. Coolidge is a caver who had visited and written poems about Eldon’s. In 1972 Coolidge and Mayer were both close friends and comrades in writing, fearless really in their desire to respect no limit. To grasp what this felt like to them and what writing flowed from their mutual regard for one another and their openness to all possibilities The Cave is a good place to start. It is irresistible say I who has never explored a cave to compare Coolidge and Mayer’s collaboration to exploring a cave and it may even be accurate. You enter a cave not knowing exactly where it will lead but adventure is what you want and so you write your way into and around where you have never been before. There are two great improvisers are at work in The Cave; and what emerges is their imaginations’ response in language non-existent until the moment of its writing down.
