I know the rest of the night will be as devoted to work as love as I’m now resting in this expensive sentence and in the end I’ll spend it fast writing to you anyway, addressing you and a solution or night beginning like a letter, just a few words more freely seeing everything more clearly than the rest of life and love tends to be like windows facing mostly south but surrounding us, I’m thinking of you.
Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day is a book-length poem entirely written on December 22, 1978. It documents her day—early morning dreams, midday chores with her toddlers, late night all-night writing sessions with her partner—in a panoply of poetic modes. Chris and Suzanne read the poem alongside some of the other books they’ve read this year, and consider Mayer’s works and days.
Show Notes.Bernadette Mayer: Midwinter Day. [Bookshop.]
Other books by Bernadette Mayer: Memory. Studying Hunger Journals. Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer. Sonnets. A Bernadette Mayer Reader. The Helens of Troy, NY. Milkweed Smithereens. 0 to 9: The Complete Magazine, 1967–1969.
Bernadette Mayer’s pages at the Poetry Foundation and PennSound.
Some of her early works can be found at Eclipse.
Obituaries in the New York Times and Artforum.
Our episodes on Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, the Metaphysical Poets, the Iliad, and The Waste Land.
Geoffrey Chaucer: The House of Fame.
Ted and Alice are Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley.
John Donne: A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.
Sonnet [You jerk you didn’t call me up].
Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments.
Next: Sadeq Hedayat: Blind Owl. [Bookshop.]
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