Bernadette Mayer

Bernadette Mayer (May 12, 1945 – November 22, 2022) was an American poet, writer, and visual artist associated with both the Language poets and the New York School.

Bernadette Mayer was born in a predominantly German part of Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. Her parents were, as she writes in the autobiographical piece, "0–19", "a mother-secretary & father draft dodger WWII electrician". Mayer's parents died when she was in her early teens and her uncle, a legal guardian after the passing of her parents, died only a few years later. She had one sister, Rosemary Mayer, a sculptor who was a member of similar conceptual art communities during the 1970s and 1980s, in addition to being a founding member of the feminist art space A.I.R. Gallery. Mayer attended Catholic schools early on, where she studied languages and the classics, and she graduated from the New School for Social Research in 1967.

Mayer's work first caught public attention with her exhibit Memory, a multimedia work that challenged ideas of narrative and autobiography in conceptual art and created an immersive poetic environment. In 1970, her partner Ed Bowes showed her how to use a 35mm camera. During July 1971, Mayer photographed one roll of film each day, resulting in a total of 1200 photographs. Mayer then recorded a 31-part narration as she remembered the context of each image, using them as "taking-off points for digression" and to "[fill] in the spaces between." In the first full-showing of the exhibit at the 98 Greene Street Loft, the photographs were installed on boards in sequential rows as Mayer's seven-hour audio track played a single time between the gallery's open and close. Memory asked its observer to be a critical student of the work, as one would with any poetic text, while putting herself into the position of the artist. An early version of Memory, remembering, toured seven locations in the U.S. and Europe from 1973 to 1974 as part of Lucy R. Lippard's female-centric conceptual art show, "c. 7,500". Memory's audio narration was later edited and turned into a book published by North Atlantic Books in 1976. Memory served as the jumping off point for Mayer's next book, a 3-year experiment in stream-of-conscious journal writing Studying Hunger (Adventures in Poetry, 1976), and these diaristic impulses would continue to be a significant part of Mayer's writing practice over the next few decades.

Mayer's record-keeping and use of stream-of-consciousness narrative are two trademarks of her writing. In addition to the influence of her textual-visual art and journal-keeping, Mayer's poetry is widely acknowledged as some of the first to speak accurately and honestly about the experience of motherhood. Mayer edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci, and, until 1983, United Artists books and magazines with Lewis Warsh. Mayer taught at the New School for Social Research, where she earned her degree in 1967, and, during the 1970s, she led a number of workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in New York City. Writers who attended or sat in on her workshops included Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, John Giorno, and Anne Waldman. From 1980 to 1984, Mayer served as director of the Poetry Project. Her influence in the contemporary avant-garde is felt widely.

Mayer received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (1995). She was also a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipient, a 2009 Creative Capital Awardee, and received a National Book Critics Circle Nomination for her most recent book, 2016's Works and Days.

In 2016, the critic Stephanie Burt characterized Mayer's work as showing "by effusive, charming, sometimes hyperbolic example how to reject any model of poetry that requires perfection and uptight isolation."

Like many younger poets, Mayer found a home in the community surrounding The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. The workshops Mayer taught there were "renowned for the variety of textual approaches deployed, and for their emphasis on nonliterary (or not primarily literary) texts," according to a history of the project published online in 2012. She taught regularly from 1971 to 1974 and sporadically during the later 1970s. From 1972 to 1973, Mayer co-edited the publication Unnatural Acts, a "collaborative writing experiment" that arose from one of her workshops. Only two issues were published, though a third—a postcard issue with work by visual artists—was planned.

Mayer was elected director of The Poetry Project in 1980 and served until Eileen Myles took over in 1984. As director, Mayer retooled the marathon reading and worked to get more funding for The Project's programming, including a $10,000 donation from The Grateful Dead. Mayer was partly responsible for starting a lecture series and a Monday night reading series.