The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters

by Bernadette Mayer, Laynie Browne (Foreword by)

Overview

Co-published with SplitLevel Texts
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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937658670
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	02/07/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

BERNADETTE MAYER was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. A prolific poet, her first book was published when she was twenty-three years old. Now, many texts later, she continues to write progressive poetry from her home in East Nassau, New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction Laynie Browne 9

Plural Dream of Social Life 17

Public Lice 21

A Bean of Mine 24

Horror Story (A Reminder) 29

Cista Mistica 32

Kempf's Delicatessen on Forest & Putnam 35

Designing Disruptive Concealment 40

The Fly Has Married the Bumble Bee 45

Gardening in Containers 50

To the Tune of "Red Embroidered Shoes" 54

Under My Green Jacket 56

Dear Alive 60

The Well of Loneliness 62

Two Known Lilies 67

Eine Kleine Nacht Musik 69

The Prostitutes at the Eldorado Club 73

Worse Than the Noon Whistle 76

The Slicing Machine I Seen Through the Door of the Eldorado Club in the Dale 81

Dear Only 86

Pursued as She Stumbled about You It Could Signify Nothing 88

Dear Ed 94

A Proem Added 96

The Day Thurman Munson Died 98

Dear Peggy 102

Dear Rosemary 105

Dear Grace 107

Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu's Letter to Her Sister 108

Niagaraphobia 110

Anacolutha 115

Jobless Petty Criminal in 20s 120

Don't Film 130

Grace Drives a Twenty-Two-Foot Truck 134

Pregnancy Mask 139

The Notch at the Flume of the Gorge 145

The Great Stone Face, The First Frost 150

The Red Paint People 154

The Vanity of Mount Hunger 158

The Men's Men at Women's Words 163

Gargling with Marbles 168

Pear- Pie 172

Lighthouse 175

Lewis Stapling Books and Watching the Series (Pittsburgh- Baltimore) 179

Dear Alive 181

Days, Stamps, Stamp Packs, Ties, Socks, Note Pads, etc. 184

A Falling Together: To Make Strong Again as in, etc. 190

Equinoctial Tears 195

Brilliant Bravado October 20 Night 198

To Live Above (Survive) 200

Different Prescriptive Tedemones 203

"Warnings Out of Town" 207

Look Out for a Second 211

Eating a Wasp 214

November Jack 217

To View Bacon Lift Flap 221

Assworks 227

The Black Velvet Midgets 231

Visions or Desolation 236

,.;:?.(-")! 240

Hand-Shaped Poems Like Snow-Making Machines 243

Dear David 247

I'll Drown My Book 249

Portrait of a Man Holding a Glove 251

Molson Golden, Golden Lights 255

The White Squirrel Again 259

What Went Wrong 261

List the Kinds of Poetry 266

Accidental On 270

Female Poets of America 276

January 2, Full Moon, No Snow, Thin Ice 281

The Physiology of Taste 284

The Marbles of Arp 290

Two Days After Joanna Had Two Stitches 294

An Inch of Free Snow January 22 297

Almost at the Second Predicted Time for the Third Baby 301

Place All the Time 305

A Few Days Later It's with Pleasure I Write 317

Editorial Reviews

"Bernadettes Mayer's Poetry is untamed, word-loving, thought-bending, scientific, able-bodied, funny, generous, honest, and fearless. She is also a supreme formalist, especially when her poems are at their most playful and unpredictable. That is, she possesses a unique and an exemplary grammar of loving. Mayer has delivered a libertine vision of the last most free site—the home world. And it's deep, filled with everyday life, children, landlords, laundry, bills, food, dollar stores, and lovers. Sometimes when I am reading Bernadette Mayer's work I can't tell if she has a broken heart in a fierce world or a fierce heart in a broken world. I suspect it is the latter. The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters is a masterwork."—Peter Gizzi "Publishers Weekly"

"Bernadette Mayer's influential epistolary invention was written during a period of emergent, unbounded feminist literary experimentation and in the context of a vital New York School and East Coast poetic community. The republican of these adventurous, audacious, time-based, culturally critical, and sociable writings reawakens a sense of what's possible in poetry, between the freedom of improvisation and the predetermination of constraint. Mayer's invocation of the philosophical question of the other as an indeterminate aspect of the actuality and concept of mother is particularly compelling to this reader as is her durational attempt to get at about the bearing of children before they are born. This desire writing however is also, if not foremost, an event of sentences. Mayer's sentences stretch, heap, languish in densities, launch into anecdote, adjust a perspective, represent realities, compel judgment, rush past the stop, encourage self-awareness, and offer themselves to the pleasure of others."—Carla Harryman "Publishers Weekly"

"This new publication restores to print a vital text from Mayer a powerful treatise about balancing identities and conceiving both children and works of art. The long collection, originally published in 1994, assembles unsent letters drafted between summer 1979 and February 1980, during Mayer's third pregnancy—apostrophes to the living and the dead that are openly preoccupied with this new birth. Pregnancy contemplation swells to surround topics of femininity, female bodies, and what it means to be both mother and poet...Stylistically, the work holds true to Mayer's unmistakable voice, ringing with a musicality that arises through her irregular prose grammar. These forms are a foil to much of this work; the normality of pregnancy and the ordinariness of domestic life—"We have a house and it has nine rooms!"—become meaningfully heightened by Mayer's delivery of such personally specific lines. Poetry or prose, epistles or pregnancy guide; from any perspective, Mayer's rediscovered work delivers the goods."— "Publishers Weekly"

"What if we could write poetry at the very same moment we live our lives? What if we could use imagination and language to speak all sides of our mind to all of the others who we love? What if we could invent a form that is at once poetry and prose, at once direct communication and also vast and complex self-portrait of integrated imaginary, intellectual, and emotional experience? Bernadette Mayer has generously done that for us in her astounding book The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters in a way that enables us to think of everything anew. She writes a letter to the world who always writes to her all at once and one person at a time and that person is you."—Lee Ann Brown "Publishers Weekly"

From the Publisher