Bernadette Mayer

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Bernadette Mayer (born May 12, 1945) is an American poet, writer, and visual artist associated with both the Language poets and the New York School.

Early life and education

Bernadette Mayer was born in a predominantly German part of Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. Her parents were, as she writes in the autobiographical piece, "0–19", "a mother-secretary & father draft dodger WWII electrician". Mayer's parents died when she was in her early teens and her uncle, a legal guardian after the passing of her parents, died only a few years later. She had one sister, Rosemary Mayer, a sculptor who was a member of similar conceptual art communities during the 1970s and 1980s, in addition to being a founding member of the feminist art space A.I.R. Gallery. Mayer attended Catholic schools early on, where she studied languages and the classics, and she graduated from the New School for Social Research in 1967.

Mayer's work first caught public attention with her exhibit Memory, a multimedia work that challenged ideas of narrative and autobiography in conceptual art and created an immersive poetic environment. During July 1971, Mayer photographed one roll of film each day, resulting in a total of 1200 photographs. Mayer then recorded a 31-part narration as she remembered the context of each image, using them as "taking-off points for digression" and to "[fill] in the spaces between." In the first full-showing of the exhibit at the 98 Greene Street Loft, the photographs were installed on boards in sequential rows as Mayer's seven-hour audio track played a single time between the gallery's open and close. Memory asked its observer to be a critical student of the work, as one would with any poetic text, while putting herself into the position of the artist. An early version of Memory, remembering, toured seven locations in the US and Europe from 1973 to 1974 as part of Lucy R. Lippard's female-centric conceptual art show, "c. 7,500". Memory's audio narration was later edited and turned into a book published by North Atlantic Books in 1976. Memory served as the jumping off point for Mayer's next book, a 3-year experiment in stream-of-conscious journal writing Studying Hunger (Adventures in Poetry, 1976), and these diaristic impulses would continue to be a significant part of Mayer's writing practice over the next few decades.

Personal life

Early in her life Mayer lived in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Mayer was in a relationship with poet Lewis Warsh with whom she had three children. Bernadette Mayer and Warsh began living together spring 1975. They initially moved from New York to an old farmhouse in Worthington, Massachusetts and later to an apartment in Lenox. During this time their two daughters were born, Marie in 1975 and Sophia in 1977. In 1979, Warsh and Mayer and family moved to Henniker, New Hampshire, where they taught at New England College, and where their son Max was born. Of her romantic life, Mayer wrote, "Left a beautiful anarchist lover of 10 years because he wanted no responsibility for children, I chose to have three with another, now living 'alone' with them." Mayer now lives with her partner the poet Philip Good in Upstate New York.

In 1994, Mayer suffered a temporarily debilitating stroke. While she has recovered, it altered her motor skills and continues to affect her writing process.

Mayer has corresponded extensively with many writers, including poet Clark Coolidge with whom she collaborated on The Cave, a project revolving around a trip the two of them took to Eldon's Cave in western Massachusetts. Mayer has also collaborated with poets Anne Waldman, Alice Notley, Lee Ann Brown, and Jen Karmin.

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