Hawthorne said,
"I detest it! I hate Berkshire with all my whole soul
And would joyfully see its mountains laid flat...
One knows not for ten minutes
Whether he is too cold or too hot."
Like Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal, everyday issues, events, and concerns are the subjects here: living in New England, children, shopping, food (the way Mayer talks about food!), sex, love... and I wonder-- is this really a one-day poem? Written in one day? I wouldn't doubt it, but gosh. There's so much finesse; she's playing with rhyme, with form, and how is she simultaneously living and writing these experiences?
1st section: dreamscape, lucid dreaming maybe, refrains in poem mimetic of repetitions in dreams
3rd: list of building/businesses in town (play here): wordplay: (49)
In the center of town an obelisk for the Revolutionary War
Under the counter Playboy, Trojans, Tahitis and contraceptive cream
On top of the sisters' white brick house, a man on the roof
3rd again: list of current book titles (some are films maybe?) flexing intellectual and cultural muscles?
4th: everything is edible.
(68) Wittgenstein says there's no such thing as a private language. I think it would be worth trying to make one.
moves again in and out of dream, recollection and present happenings; Admiral Byrd (again) winter weather connection-- the space of a day?; uses mythical stories and Bible stories-- usually female protagonist
5th she sort of outlines the project:
Listen, I had this idea, before I met you but after we kissed in the car when I insisted on driving you right to the door though you said you could easily walk, it was only around the block
To someday become
spendthrift of emotion
as any girl or woman
No I don't mean that, I have this idea now to imitate you though I do it in secret and attribute simple love to your idea of pleasure but before that I had an idea to write a book that would translate the detail of thought from a day to language like a dream transformed to read as it does, everything, a book that would end before it started in time to prove the day like the dream has everything in it, to do this without remembering like a dream inciting writing continuously for as long as you can stand up till you fall down like in a story to show and possess everything we know because having it all at once is performing a magical service for survival by the use of mind like memory.
and in 6:
From dreams I made sentences, then what I've seen today,
Then past the past of afternoons of stories like memory
To seeing as a plain introduction to modes of love and reason
Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season
Now I've said this love it's all I can remember
Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December
Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light
That takes the bite from winter weather
And weaves the random clouds of live together
And drives away the long black night!
So much to say about this amazing book-- so I'll focus on form-- I love the way she moves between prose and lineated verse. It feels purposeful but also organic and spontaneous. I love too the long lists-- at first, I just skimmed, but then I realized that she's putting information in there that comes up again, she's painting landscapes in the poem, she's playing and punning, and she's using a classic device (listing) in this mini-epic. I was wondering how some of the devices in Inanna's poems and hymns could be appropriated to contemporary poetics, and I think this is one method. I love that Bernadette just goes for it-- and pulls it off (of course).
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