Bernadette & Cascadia Poetry Festival
This weekend was 2024 Cascadia Poetry Festival, and the last reading of the festival was a tribute to poets recently deceased, including Phyllis Webb and Barry McKinnon with Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Stephen Collis, and C.S. Giscombe. CA Conrad and I paid tribute to Bernadette Mayer—CA honoring Lyn Hejinian also.
The festival overall was just brilliant. But to have the opportunity to reflect on Bernadette Mayer's importance made it even more special. I needed this weekend with poetry. These were my words as tribute to Bernadette.
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In 2008, I was hired at Pace University as an Assistant Professor of English. We bought a house about an hour and 20 north of New York City in the Hudson Valley. A year later, I saw a workshop announced with the quintessential poet of New York, Bernadette Mayer—at her home—roughly an hour and a half from our house. Joy.
I signed up for the weekend, met my fellow students (R. Joyce Heon, Laura Goldstein, Jen Karmin) and dropped into the weekend Experimental Poetics workshop replete with red wine, conversation, poetry, and laughter.
Bernadette’s home with partner Phil Good was once a synagogue in days of yore. It is located in rural Upstate New York on the historic acreage between Kinderhook and Tsatsawassa creeks at the foothills of the Berkshires.
And so in the old synagogue and with a tap tap tap of Bernadette’s typewriter in her screened porch writing room, I was introduced to the Poetry State Forest.
We sunned ourselves at the confluence of the creeks. We ate good food. We wrote, playing with Bernadette’s experiments—for example getting up and writing at 3:15 in the morning several nights in a row.
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I felt a fast familial bond with Bernadette. Inspired to make a gift for her the following year, I curated and constructed a collaborative, hand-sewn, one-of-a-kind book with contributions from artists/writers around the country. This gift then led to a larger folio of work in Issue 14 of Drunken Boat in 2010 in which we hosted selections from the iconic magazine 0-9, reprinted with permission from Ugly Duckling Press and selections from Ceremony Latin by way of the online archive Eclipse. We linked to Bernadette Mayer’s 1978 and 1989 workshop, reading and lecture from Naropa’s Poetics Audio Archives. And featured video and accompanying text from the Bernadette Mayer Symposium at University of Buffalo in 2011.
A variety of poetry manifestations were in this folio that, to this day, give an even wider sense of Bernadette’s arc.
Maggie Nelson, in Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions , writes of Mayer’s work and the way in which it “agitates against delimitations.” I have reveled in that agitation.
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Rising above the tumult and noise of my transition from academe to move back here (and the one two punch of the pandemic) was what I missed most in New York—our friendship with Bernadette and Phil. My husband, Karl, and I visited their house regularly. We met for pizza at the beloved Two Boots near Bard. We hosted them at our little house in Kent Lakes. We read at and attended the same readings. We took walks in the Poetry State Forest.
It’s hard to believe on November 22nd, it will have been two years since Bernadette died. I still miss her.
I have as hard a time being categorized as one thing (she’s a poet) as I do about grandiose statements (poetry is everything). But honestly, I’m more likely to believe that poetry is in everything with the work of Bernadette Mayer in the world. Period.
In the New York Times’ obituary, the headline for Bernadettte’s death was a nod to her celebration of the ordinary. Diving into the ordinary, yes. But what that headline does not speak to is the fierce curiosity—the active listening and learning tooled with words and made manifest on the page.
That processing through poetry of what it means to be human at the intersections of science and the natural world is just one connection I think Bernadette’s work has with this festival.
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Some words of poetry to leave you with from Bernadette—from a Denver Quarterly published interview with Kate Schapira and me, and a poem from Poetry State Forest read by CA Conrad:
"I was thinking that—you know, John Giorno has this great poem, a new poem that he’s written called “Thanks for Nothing,” and it’s all about being a poet, and how—it’s a very illuminating poem, because it’s all about how he couldn’t figure out that he could be anything else. Nothing else made any sense to him. And I kinda feel that way too."
"Oh! Oh, I have one thing I wanna say, which I think is very important. I read this interview with John Ashbery recently, it was one in an old Paris Review. He says whenever he wants to write poetry, it’s like a little river that’s always flowing, and you can just dip into it and write. I think that’s a great analogy."
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All Aboard
Tumbled down an incline at Bash Bish
Broke many things; it was still spring
Clouded over, it was too rainy to walk annually
At Bartholomew's Cobble; a coneflower appeared
As did a lupin, even some alyssum
Be forewarned: the eternal perennial
Is not immortal, though rooted in the ground
& coming back, it might disappear
In a wild fire, tornado or apocalypse
Or move over in a spring flood
Or earthquake; you move over & you'll see
The same thing you saw yesterday, maybe
It's the welcome wagon, here's
A cherry pie; the cherries are eternal
Bernadette Mayer, from Poetry State Forest