I couldn’t leave New York without a poetry collection (well, I guess two poetry collections, given that I had already bought Victoria Chang’s The Trees Witness Everything). I’d had it in mind to visit Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn, but it was closed the day I was there. Luckily, Brooklyn is a highly literary place and I found another book store within a block or two and, within a few minutes of being there, Harneet handed me Bernadette Mayer’s Milkweed Smithereens. When I opened the book to a random page, it just so happened that Mayer referenced another one of my favourite authors:
“vladimir nabokov said:
i confess i do not believe in time
in BEING AND TIME, poor heidegger
didn’t finish the time part in time
to publish it with the being part
so everything-now must be not-being” (14).
References to Nabokov and time was enough to persuade my pocket to shell its money out, and so I acquired Milkweed Smithereens.
When I started the collection proper, I found Mayer’s work a bit alienating. The first poem uses precise and technical diction for describing flowers, which makes it challenging to imagine what she’s referring to when you’re a layman on the topic. The second poem, “The Joys of Dahlias,” descends into sound-association, a form that doesn’t really resonate with me much: “blah blah blah it’s blue satin bliss / the bishop of York wants some blackberry ice / the blue bayou is bluetiful, bonnie Esperance / is blue purple-urple or more like bridezilla?” (6). The predominance of “b”s is clear, but the meaning is not. It seems that sound, rather than logic, dictates the progression of the poem, which makes it hard for me to get anything out of it.
Over time, though, the freeform style of Mayer’s poems grew on me and the poems themselves offer some justification for their haphazard associations. In one poem, Mayer makes a passing comment on taking on an expressive style—if I recall correctly, she notes the transition to an expressive mode with some trepidation. In another poem, Mayer offers a more explicit stance against the overly curated, overly manicured nature of poems:
“the idea that writing is easy comes from the frank o’hara method. but it is in fact easy, especially if you don’t try to say more than you are thinking, to say other than what you’re thinking, for instance you might be trying to say what somebody else is thinking, like barthes or lacan. slowly does the middle tree turn yellow, always having been the most interesting fall tree, it is somewhat damaged with dead parts you can see from the field, it’s the tree whose branch snapped off & hung there threatening our (covid) social life till when it fell. Now threatening is cold weather, can’t sit outdoors, our plan is to borrow a tent from grace, & in it use our mr. heater buddy, little buddy, maybe it will work” (52).
There’s a free and easy quality to the writing that mimics the “frank o’hara method.” I find Mayer’s comment compelling that writing is easy “if you don’t try to say more than you are thinking, to say other than what you’re thinking.” In such a simple phrase, Mayer deconstructs basically all of modern poetry, or at least modern criticism, wherein we read with suspicion: imagery is not imagery, but the interior world of the speaker; the speaker’s stated views are either ironic or satirical, never sincere. In this collection, Mayer’s style offers a more natural approach to poetry, perhaps getting to the core of a poetic ‘moment’ rather than a poetic ‘vision.’ Less of a construct, the stream-of-consciousness approach offers a range of possibilities often closed off to other poets.
This aesthetic approach presents itself most clearly and effectively in “from The Covid Diary,” a long prose poem that is interspersed throughout the others. While artwork about the pandemic already feels dated, there’s enough in Mayer’s work to offer a case for its presence. You’ll notice that in the lengthy passage I quoted above, Mayer starts with literary referents—Frank O’Hara, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan—before jumping to a lush image of a dying tree. There’s a parenthetical reference to Covid, unobtrusively but noticeably embedded in simple moments, a background interruption. Then, Mayer moves to a personal note about borrowing a tent from Grace. It’s like a collage of ‘high’ culture philosophers with the ‘low’ form of a note-to-self and all the things in between.
The Covid diary takes up a significant portion of Milkweed Smithereens and often includes short references to passing thoughts—to repeat—in a free and easy style. In the first, Mayer reflects, “can you feel sorry for a field? i feel sorry for myself though i’m smarter than the field maybe, but not as smart as nabokov, as we both go around criticizing everything, but poor nabokov didn’t understand about whales’ memories of the future, how come?” (8). The more that time passes, the more I value the record of deeply personal, possibly foolish, philosophical reflections. The idea of feeling sorry for a field feels both extraordinarily particular and deeply universal. It doesn’t hurt that the next sentence is profoundly relatable: feeling sorry for yourself because you’re not as smart as Nabokov—been there; I’d say “done that”, but I feel like it’ll be forever ongoing.
The poems in the collection fall into one of several categories, though the boundaries between them are not necessarily defined. Some of the poems are reflections on flowers; others are reflections on time and memory; others deal with the realities of isolation in times of Covid; others identify all-too-relatable concerns with a (then new) Trump presidency and its implications; others are about friends and family; others express a kind of aesthetics of poetry.
One of the stand-out poems in this regard is “I IMAGINE A POEM by bernadette mayer (Based on the poem by ALAN CASLINE)”. I like the cheekiness of identifying herself as the poet in the title of the poem. It’s a subtly subversive spin that places the oft-effacing poet figure front and center. The poem expresses the same ethic of attention and focus that appears in other poems: “even now the vacuum cleaner sounds like / it’s rehearsing a poem” (67). Partway through, the speaker offers a challenge to the poet: “i dare you to make this a real poem, half / as wide & with all the sounds of the angelic choirs / of poetry, or, of the homelessness of poetry, or the wild / thyme-ish-ness of poetry” (67). It’s an unusual move to see the poem itself or at least its speaker challenge its writer so directly and, while in some other contexts this might feel like a cheap move, here it feels entirely appropriate to the vision of the book. In a paradoxical stance, the artificial distance between poem and poet here serves to highlight the personality and unique voice of the poet.
When I mentioned the core motifs of the poems, I neglected to mention stinkbugs, ticks, and thoughts of death. There’s a resignation towards death—not that Mayer goes gentle into that goodnight—that seems prescient; Milkweed Smithereens was released and Mayer passed away in the same year. The poems do have an elegiac quality, especially in the journalistic style of her Covid diary. You can feel the world getting slower, the great winding down.
The final poem in the collection is called “Conclusion.” It’s quite short, and I feel justified in citing it in its entirety:
“The Method of Repeated Reproduction of
remembered material with increasing lapse
of time, until it has reached a stereotyped
form through transformations in which influences
play, excites an attitude of uncertainty, which
has nothing to do with objective inaccuracy,
towards the introduction of what is new” (85).
Given the repeated motifs in the collection, referencing the “Method of Repeated Reproduction” is a nice summation of the project. (Incidentally, it reminds me of Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, in which the main character draws someone from memory and then every day produces a portrait based on the previous one). Mayer having these flashes of memory despite increasing lapses of time seems to imbue these moments with additional significance. The final lines offer an outline of Mayer’s process: “influences play” (consider the references to Nabokov, Heidegger, or Barthes), “an attitude of uncertainty” underlies the poems by being ambiguous and not easily pinned down into one meaning, and there is no concern for “objective” accuracy—the personal experiences override the constructed and fixed nature of poems. I think it’s wonderful that the final line of the poem posits a project that moves “towards the introduction of what is new.” In many ways, I feel like that is a wonderful ‘last line’ for a poet to write before they pass away. What a wonderful encapsulation of possibility and an assertion of the hopes for a lifetime of poetry.
I hope that each of us can bring that spirit to our lives: may we all introduce something new in our own ways. We’ll all be more enriched for it.
Happy reading!
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