Bernadette Mayer

Milkweed Smithereens gathers lively, wickedly smart, intimate, and indelible Bernadette Mayer poems: the volume ranges from brand-new nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from her Covid Diary and Second World of Nature to early poems and sonnets found in the attic or rooted out in the UC San Diego archive. The world of nature and the pandemic loom large, as in her “The Lobelias of Fear”:

…but how will we, still alive, socialize
in the winter? wrapped in bear skins
we’ll sit around pot-bellied stoves eating
the lobelias of fear left over from desperation,
last summer’s woodland sunflowers and bee balm remind us of black
cherries eaten in a hurry
while the yard grows in the moonlight
shrinking like a salary …

Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022) published her first book when she was twenty-three years old. For many year she lived and worked on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She was the Director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1980 to 1984. Mayer taught at Naropa Poetics Institute, New School for Social Research, College of Staten Island, and New England College.

This collection of the correspondence between artist Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) and poet Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) occurs between the years of 1976 and 1980, a period of rich creativity in New York's artistic avant-garde, and one which includes the development of major bodies of work by the two women.

Rosemary Mayer was creating sculptures, watercolors, books and temporary monuments from weather balloons and snow, while Bernadette Mayer was working on some of her best-known publications, including the book-length poem Midwinter Day and the poetry collection The Golden Book of Words.

Spanning the worlds of Conceptual art, Postminimalism, feminism, the New York School, Language poetry and more, these letters elucidate the bonds of sisterhood through intimate exchanges about art, relationships and everyday life.

Midwinter Day, as Alice Notley noted, is an epic poem about a daily routine. A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again:...

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 cloth of life together/ And drives away the long black night!

The Cave is a collaboration of prose, poetry, dialogue, and song alternately written by Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer in their early thirties. Assembled between 1972 and 1978, The Cave explores the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the nature of language, and the connections between the present and past. It constantly challenges the reader to question reality, time, and the poets themselves. The work ranges from complex and imagistic rambles through imaginary landscapes to terse, clear accounts of exploring Eldon's Cave in western Massachusetts, the setting of several of Coolidge's poems. Like a mystery novel, The Cave draws the reader in with hints that all the strands weave together into a coherent picture.

Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer have been writing for over fifty years, and they have both had an unquantifiable impact on the direction of experimental poetry. In the words of Marcella Durand, who provides an introduction to The Cave, "Coolidge and Mayer evidently shared a common mission in their writings to encompass consciousness, language, and the intricacy of physical/scientific/geologic structures, and to cross whatever fake borders had been set up between genres, materials, or even words themselves."

Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh wrote Piece of Cake as a work of collaborative prose poetry, based on a process of each writing on alternate days in the course of August of 1976-the bicentennial year of the America's Declaration of Independence. It recounts the quotidian details of daily activities, negotiating the exigencies of young, married-with-children life, the artistic path and citizenship. It has the classic "I did this, I did that" of a New York School of Poetry text, as characterized by the poetry of Frank O'Hara, and is somewhat reminiscent of Mayer's work Studying Hunger Journal, written not long before taking up Piece of Cake. Another distinguishing feature of this work is that it is arguably the first significant male-female collaboration in 20th century American poetry. Regarding the possible derivation of the work's title, and exemplary of the work's tenor, is the start of Warsh's entry of August 29: "I also recall getting up and eating a piece of left-over cake (a very sweet store-bought cake with green or possibly pinkish icing) and drinking a glass of milk at the kitchen window. Empty streets, no moon. Michael and Twinkie asleep on the floor of Bernadette's room, Guy and Karen in mine, Bill on the couch in the living room. Marie in her crib. Everyone 'dead to the world,' a phrase I dislike, what a full house.

Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received her B.A. from the New School for Social Research in 1967. She is the author of more than two dozen volumes of poetry. From 1972 to 1974, Mayer and conceptual artist Vito Acconci edited the journal 0 TO 9, and in 1977 she established United Artists Press with the poet Lewis Warsh. She has taught writing workshops at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City for many years, and she served as the Poetry Project's director.

Lewis Warsh is the author of over thirty volumes of poetry, fiction and autobiography, including Out of the Question: Selected Poems (Station Hill, 2017), Alien Abduction (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), One Foot Out the Door: Collected Stories (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), A Place in the Sun (Spuyten Duyvil, 2010) and Inseparable (Granary Books, 2008). He was co-founder, with Bernadette Mayer, of United Artists Magazine and Books, and co-editor, with Anne Waldman, of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books, 2001).

Published January 2020. 

A Bernadette Mayer Reader collects texts that were originally published in small press books and chapbooks, magazines, and anthologies. The book holds poetry and prose from Mayer’s earliest works to then-contemporary publications. From Story (1968), to excerpts from Desires of Mothers and Midwinter Day (1982), and including a cache of new poems, this is a sprawling, surprising collection of Mayer at her best.

The reader was met with praise from peers and critics alike. In the words of Jackson Mac Low, "[Mayer] never gets stuck in one place - she changes as the spirit moves her- and her structural inventions and self-revelations provoke surprise and delight." 

Of the publication, Fanny Howe writes, "America could prove that her conscience, heart, and intelligence are still operating with this one volume of poetry." 

Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. A most prolific poet, her first book was published at the age of twenty-three. Many texts later she continues to write progressive poetry from her home in East Nassau, New York. For many years Mayer lived and worked on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she was the Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project from 1980-1984. Bernadette Mayer has received grants and awards from PEN American Center, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, the NEA, The Academy of American Poets, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Published 1992

A collection of texts defining utopia as a place existing only within the domain of language, Utopia gives a synthesis of historical utopias and a snapshot of the 1970-1980's poetic scene.

An avant-garde writer associated with the New York School of poets, Bernadette Mayer was born in 1945 in Brooklyn, New York, where she lives and works. From 1967 to 1969, she published the experimental newspaper 0 to 9 with artist Vito Acconci, which combined texts and works of writers and conceptual artists based on the use of language (Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Aram Saroyan, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Morton Feldman or Sol LeWitt).

In 1967—along with Lewis Warsh—she founded the publishing house United Artists Books which published a number of influential writers such as Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, Hannah Weiner, James Schuyler, Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley as well as Mayer's own books like 1978's The Golden books of Words or 1984's Utopia. Known for her innovative use of language, Mayer rose to prominence with the exhibition “Memory,” which combined photography and narration. During July 1971 Mayer took daily photographs and recorded her thoughts. These materials formed the basis for the exhibition, and for the eponymous book published in 1975. In 1980, Mayer became director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York where she also ran literary workshops. She also initiated the Poetry Project's Reading Series.
Mayer's composition methods such as chance operation, collage and cut-up identifies her as being close to the likes of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low or Frank O'Hara—central figures of the New York School—as well as more contemporary figures associated with the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Mayer's work is also influenced by modernist figures such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and the Dadaists or classical authors (Catullus).

French Edition.
Published in June 2016.

In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: for one month she shot a roll of 35mm film each day and kept a journal. The result was a conceptual work that investigates the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures and material. Memory is both monumental in scope (over 1,100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and a groundbreaking work by a poet who is widely regarded as one of the most innovative experimental writers of her generation. Presaging Mayer's durational, constraint-based diaristic works of poetry, it also evinces her extraordinary —and often unheralded— contribution to conceptual art.

Mayer has called Memory "an emotional science project," but it is far from confessional. This boldly experimental record follows the poet's eye as she traverses early morning into night, as quotidian minutiae metamorphose into the lyrical, as her stream of consciousness becomes incantatory. In text and image, Mayer constructs the mercurial consciousness of the present moment from which memory is —as she says— "always there, to be entered, like the world of dreams or an ongoing TV show."

This publication brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form, making space for a work that has been legendary but mostly invisible. Originally exhibited in 1972 by pioneering gallerist Holly Solomon, it was not shown again in its entirety until 2016 at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and then again in 2017 in New York City at the CANADA Gallery. The text was published without the photographs in 1975 by North Atlantic Books in an edition that has long been out of print.

Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) is the author of over 30 books, including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994) and Work and Days (2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, Mayer has also been an influential teacher and editor. In the art world, she is best known for her collaboration with Vito Acconci as editors of the influential mimeographed magazine 0 TO 9.

A reissue of Bernadette Mayer's classic fugitive intergenre text. Endlessly inclusive, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, first published in 1994 and long out of print, evokes the complexity of real persons as it simultaneously reinvents multiple genres: epistle, prose poem, and memoir.

Written between 1979 and 1980 while pregnant with her third child, Mayer extends her imaginative letters into meditations for us all on life as it is lived in real time, with its responsibilities and manifold desires. Fierce, lyrical, intimate, and wise, both new and familiar readers, both mothers and non–mothers, will find this book beckoning again and again to offer delicious writing, timely information, consolation, and advice.

With Introduction by Laynie Browne. 

Profiles of all the women named Helen in Troy, NY, with poems and images, mixing the classical with the ordinary and delightful intelligence with irreverence. 

'everybody died there’s nothing more to say my hair’s braided like a family i took off, it was fun, i loved it if you did something wrong, they punished you one helen is enough, trust me'

What do gardens mean and how can they change the world? A Garden Manifesto gathers radical visions rooted in the earth from artists, writers, gardeners and activists, among them Lubaina Himid, Derek Jarman, Jamaica Kincaid, Ana Mendieta, Dan Pearson and Wolfgang Tillmans. It’s a seed box for an uncertain future, packed with anarchic dreams of Eden-making and humming with resistance to the colonial project of homogenisation and destruction.

Featuring William Blake, Joe Brainard, Jonny Bruce, John Clare, Gerry Dalton, Ellen Dillon, Baha Ebdeir, Alys Fowler, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Gaylene Gould, Green Guerillas, Joy Gregory, Fritz Haeg, Lubaina Himid, Philip Hoare, Rosie Hudson, Derek Jarman, Chantal Joffe, Laura Joy, Jamaica Kincaid, Elisabeth Kley, Olivia Laing, Jeremy Lee, Siobhan Liddell, Alison Lloyd, Hilary Lloyd, Jo McKerr, Lee Mary Manning, Ana Mendieta, Bernadette Mayer, Rosemary Mayer, Huw Morgan, Eileen Myles, Hussein Omar, Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library, Ian Patterson, Dan Pearson, Jean Perréal, Charlie Porter, Pat Porter, J. H. Prynne, Claire Ratinon, Jamie Reid, Lisa Robertson, Kuba Ryniewicz, Saadi, Sui Searle, Sei Shōnagon, Colin Stewart, Tabboo!, Edward Thomasson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Scott Treleaven, John Wieners, David Wojnarowicz, Matt Wolf and Sarah Wood

Through work by artists and poets of various generations and geographies, as well as additional contributors, SIREN (some poetics) considers the ways in which language is increasingly employed by artists in works that trouble the line between language as a literary practice and language as a visual one. Both human and nonhuman forms of language-making and poetics are insisted upon, from precolonial myth to scientific speculation, fungal networks to gut bacteria, text to textile, poem to algorithm. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at Amant, in Brooklyn, SIREN (some poetics) figures language in manifold forms: poem and essay, score and script, list and litany. All, though, emit and evidence a kind of parapoetics: poetry as opaque metabolic structuring or as some wild surfacing.

With texts by Hana Noorali & Lynton Talbot, Ruth Estevez, Quinn Latimer and excerpts by Don Mee Choi, Anais Duplan, Franz Kafka, Christa Wolf, a.o., and with artist contributions by Katja Aufleger, Patricia L. Boyd, Bia Davou, Sky Hopinka, Liliane Lijn, Bernadette Mayer, Rosemary Mayer, Nour Mobarak, Senga Nengudi, Rivane Neuenschwander, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Aura Satz, Ser Serpas, Shanzhai Lyric, Jenna Sutela, Iris Touliatou, and Dena Yago

This book emerged out of a collaborative writing project that began in 2020 in response to The 3:15 Experiment. The ‘experiment’ involved a group of poets who, every August, would write nightly at 3:15am from wherever they were. It began in 1993 with six poets (Bernadette Mayer, Danika Dinsmore, Jen Hofer, Kathleen Large, Lee Ann Brown, and Myshel Prasad) at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University, Colorado), then continued every August for 22 years, with the group growing to over 25 poets, participating from various time-zones. Four of the initial poets—Mayer, Dinsmore, Hofer, and Brown—compiled The 3:15 Experiment (Owl Press, 2001), a selection of their middle-of-the-night writings between 1993-2000.

This edition builds further on this practice.

"We started thinking about a reading and writing practice that is shared but still divisible, divisible but not subtractable. The structures created by synchronicity, repetition, and temporal constraint felt generative. We found that these structures produced the conditions for another logic to emerge, a night-time logic. This night-time logic gestured to a different kind of self perhaps, a self somewhere between a waking-I and a sleeping-I, a self emerged through habit. After all, logic is just a habit.

This nightly rhythm has now become a yearly ritual: every October we’ve returned to this shared practice. As Jen Hofer says, it’s just “to see what is there. Merely what is there, merely to see.”(2) The poems in this book have been compiled from our first batch of 1:53’s. We edited them ‘together-together’—together trying to attune to each poem’s internal logic, while also trying to locate a collective voice that (we hope) textures throughout.

(Certainly) any writing idea of Bernadette’s is one worth pursuing. This book is dedicated to Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022), and the certainty of possibility her work opens up to us."

on nmp.16: 
english, chicago screw, folio cover, 148 x 210 mm
first edition, edition of 115 (numbered).

Limn the Distance imagines decentralisation through the poetics of Bernadette Mayer and the concentric communities of one mountain. From major cities to art worlds, godheads to bodies and the spaces they inhabit, it asks what happens when we move away from the assumed nuclei of these knowledge and value systems. Orbiting around one mountain in upstate New York, Limn the Distance speaks of and through the communities that have resided there—from the radical sectarian shakers, and efforts towards communitarian living and small-scale farming that have happened in their wake, as well as the life and legacy of Bernadette Mayer who lived nearby. Through personal narrative and lyrical essay, the book draws on communitarian and artistic traditions of decentralised practice and resists the easy binarisms of solitude and sociality, ruralism and urbanism.

After hours in the dry heat of the polytunnel with its blue tarp and the warm and hopeless rotational pull of its fan system, we enter delirium—at the edges of our bodies—skin slick and supple with allium dust and sweat.

To know one’s place, to lose one’s place—

Years have unfurled—entire pandemics—since I began; began to depart from the original conception of my place, my writing, my body and began to know the edges of them—as limits, as possibilities—the lip, brink, shores of them; their fringes. 

‘In her exquisite essay Rose searches for utopias and circles the Mountain. Home to the abstinent Shakers with their visions as gifts; farming (also a gift) and the relationship between Rosemary and Bernadette Mayer (double gift). The utopias here are all approximate, the quest personal, the Mountain real. Limn The Distance is glittering and beautifully stitched as Rose seeks alternative economies (of friendship and feminism, for how to live now). Her first book is an awakening borne of art and agriculture, theory and poetry— all on the border of this Mountain.’ - Jennifer Kabat

Rose Higham-Stainton is a writer and critic interested in gender and art-making, material culture and resistance. Her work is held in the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College and has been published by LA Review of Books, Texte Zur Kunst, Artforum, The White Review, Art Monthly, X-Tra, Bricks from the Kiln, Apollo, MAP Magazine, and Worms. She has written several chapbooks. Limn the Distance is her first book.

Conceptual writing is emerging as a vital 21st century literary movement and I’ll Drown My Book represents the contributions of women in this defining moment. Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, I’ll Drown My Book takes its name from a poem by Bernadette Mayer, appropriating Shakespeare. The book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries, with contributors’ responses to the question—What is conceptual writing?—appearing alongside their work. I’ll Drown My Book offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Kathy Acker, Oana Avasilichioaei & Erin Moure, Dodie Bellamy, Lee Ann Brown, Angela Carr, Monica de la Torre, Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Jen Hofer, Bernadette Mayer, Sharon Mesmer, Laura Mullen, Harryette Mullen, Deborah Richards, Juliana Spahr, Cecilia Vicuña, Wendy Walker, Jen Bervin, Inger Christiansen, Marcella Durand, Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Jennifer Karmin, Mette Moestrup, Yedda Morrison, Anne Portugal, Joan Retallack, Cia Rinne, Giovanni Singleton, Anne Tardos, Hannah Weiner, Christine Wertheim, Norma Cole, Debra Di Blasi, Stacy Doris & Lisa Robertson, Sarah Dowling, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Laura Moriarty, Redell Olsen, Chus Pato, Julie Patton, Kristin Prevallet, a.rawlings, Ryoko Seikiguchi, Susan M. Schultz, Rosmarie Waldrop, Renee Angle, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tina Darragh, Judith Goldman, Susan Howe, Maryrose Larkin, Tracie Morris, Sawako Nakayasu, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jena Osman, kathryn l. pringle, Frances Richard, Kim Rosenfeld, and Rachel Zolf.

A selection of interviews and rare photos from the legendary St. Mark's Poetry Project for its 50th anniversary season.

The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church was founded in 1966 for the overlapping circles of poets in the Lower East Side of New York. These interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter form a kind of conversation over time between some of the late 20th century's most influential poets and artists, who have come together in this legendary venue over the past 50 years.

Includes interviews with Charles North, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, David Rattray, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Harryette Mullen, Barbara Henning, David Henderson, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, Samuel Delany, Harry Matthews, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Renee Gladman, Lorenzo Thomas, Fred Moten, Stan Brakhage, Alex Katz, Lewis Warsh, Ron Padgett, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eileen Myles, and more.

"I find it one of the liveliest points of communication in the American poetry world. There is an incredible excitement to come to the church and read one's poems to the many other poets who congregate there, drawn to the church by its own energy and thrust."—Donald Hall

From the introduction, by Anselm Berrigan: "For the poets closely involved with the Poetry Project since, and subsequent to, its inception, the interviews were an opportunity to speak directly to a community one could perceive as known, imaginary, expanding, unwieldy, intermittent, formative, desperately necessary, and sometimes peculiarly unsatisfying all at once. Community being the kind of term that often implies everything and nothing simultaneously, with the bottom falling out of the word depending on who happens to be wielding it. Poets can be particularly adept at using and exposing such terms."

Edited by Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams, the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene is an edited anthology of poetry by contemporary UK writers, whose work manifests ecology in the body, in language, in lyric and colour and play. A book that arrives with its own weather, an acid-bright sense of urgency, detail and care; a book that speaks to a nowness that slides between crisis and the everyday arts of noticing which bear us through massive scalar change, survival and sorrow.

As Bernadette Mayer writes in 'The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica': 'Do not be afraid of your own heart beating / Look at very small things with your eyes / & stay warm'. Riffing on the etymology of 'anthology' as a gathering of flowers, this book samples from a luminous range of poets responding to 'the anthropocene' as a kind of thought device for grasping extinction, global heating and climate breakdown.

'Poems are the future sliding against the past', writes Timothy Morton in the book's foreword; these works perform the shimmering art of recognising the multiple temporalities, tenses and agencies, problems and potentials of this fraught term, 'the anthropocene'.

The weird folds intervenes in more traditional canons of nature and ecopoetry to offer a poetics of the anthropocene which is thoroughly generous, queer, sensuous, formally innovative, relational, occult, fugitive and critically sensitive to the mediations of technology and culture which shape our encounters with the more-than-human.

"Nelson's revision of the New York School makes it not only more diverse but also more resistant of defining tropes. By showing how a motley collection of poets and artists defied the gendered conventions of both the aesthetic status quo and the so-called experimental, Nelson restores the avant-garde to its raison d'etre: to lead us past orthodoxy to discovery."—Modern Painters

"Nelson has produced the kind of boundary-busting scholarship perhaps most likely to push the field toward greater clarity concerning its parameters, urgent questions, and dramatis personae."—American Literature

“After decades of listening (enthralled, of course) to the knitted ribbon-dress observations of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler, finally, the other serious ladies of the necessarily ‘so-called’ New York School—Joan Mitchell, Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles—are invited to give their full-throated response. Smart as a whip and fun as an after-hours bar, Maggie Nelson gets fresh with heretofore queerly ignored matters poetic, aesthetic, and feminist. Rearranging the school’s classroom seating, illuminating details, all the while demonstrating how crucial not-caring is to care, Nelson remaps the ‘one flow’ of poetry. Let me be blunt: reading her bravura study’s like spying Joan Jett taking Helen Vendler for a joyride.”—Bruce Hainley

 “This is a terrific and necessary book. . . . Maggie Nelson charts new paths for work on the New York School and on postwar experimental writing, and her book will be necessary reading for anyone working in the area—it will reach poets and other writers, visual artists, and scholars interested in the New York School and in avant-garde or experimental work; it will reach readers interested in women’s contributions to the arts, urban culture, and the history of New York City.”—Susan Rosenbaum, University of Georgia, author, Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading

 “So many times over the years I’ve been asked, What’s it like to be a woman in rock music? It’s always been sort of a paralyzing question—to answer it is to give the question itself meaning. Maggie Nelson here opens it all up for examination with this incredibly timely and astute book.”—Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth

“Maggie Nelson is deft and revelatory in bringing sociological as well as psychological, stylistic, and political insights to bear on her title terms, ‘women’ and ‘the New York School.’ She lays bare an obscured history, performs imaginative and incisive readings of careers as well as books and poems, and foots her way with exciting skill through the overlapping minefields of professional, national, and sexual politics.”—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author, A Dialogue on Love
In this whip-smart study, Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell as well as a reconsideration of the work of many male New York School writers and artists from a feminist perspective.

With contagious enthusiasm, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions ranges widely and covers collaborations between poets and painters in the 1950s and 1960s; the complex role played by the “true abstraction” of the feminine in the work of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler; the intricate weave of verbal and visual arts throughout the postwar period, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop to Conceptualism to feminist and queer performance art; and the unfolding, diverse careers of Mayer, Notley, and Myles from the 1970s to the present. Along the way, Nelson considers provocative questions of anonymity and publicity, the solitary and the communal, the enduring and the ephemeral, domesticity, boredom, sex, and politics.

By asking us to rethink the ways in which we conceptualize “schools” and “avant-gardes” and eventually drawing our attention to larger, compelling questions about how and why we read—and how gender and sexuality inform that reading in the first place—Maggie Nelson not only fills an important gap in the history of American poetry and art but also gives an inspired performance of the kind of lively, audacious, and personally committed criticism that befits her subject.

Hannah Weiner's Open House beckons us into a realm of poetry that bends consciousness in order to open the doors of perception. Weiner is one of the great American linguistic inventors of the last thirty years of the 20th century. She created an alchemical poetry that transforms the materials of everyday life into a dimension beyond sensory perception. The pieces collected here are as much conceptual art as sprung prose, experimental mysticism as social realism, autobiography as egoless alyric. Patrick Durgin has brought together touchstone works, some familiar and some never before published. Hannah Weiner's Open House provides the only single volume introduction to the full range of Weiner's vibrant, enthralling, and unique contribution to the poetry of the Americas. (Charles Bernstein)

Hannah Weiner's influence extends from the sixties New York avant-garde, where she was part of an unprecedented confluence of poets, performance and visual artists including Phillip Glass, Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneeman, John Perrault, David Antin, and Bernadette Mayer. Like fellow-traveler Jackson Mac Low, she became an important part of the Language movement of the 70s and 80s, and her influence can be seen today in the so-called New Narrative work stemming from the San Francisco Bay Area.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 19th issue, “very good*” is edited with Paul Abbott. Like music, the issue’s “theme” is better off unaccounted for, and up in the air, like a flock of birds (creatures who feature heavily), circling around performance, listening bodies, given time, and loving relations.

The nineteenth issue of ‘F.R.DAVID’ is edited by Will Holder and Paula Abbott, and will serve as a reader for “We can still see the horizon (and it’s curved)”, a summer residency in Scotland led by the editors. It includes a surprising array of contributions from writer Jorge Luis Borges, journalist and writer Italo Calvino, composer Hugo Cole, literary critic and theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith, percussionist Milford Graves, philosopher Michel Serres, novelist and essayist Wilson Harris, poet Bernadette Mayer, composer and music theorist Harry Partch, pianist and poet Cecil Taylor, and several others.