Playing With Mayer's Letters

Guy Tiphane
Zoe Ullman
EN 214 (Lyric)
November 10, 2003

Playing With Mayer’s Letters

Warning: the next four paragraphs constitute an essay in the Mayer style.

Poetry, it couldn’t be poetry the way my seventh grade teacher tried to tell us poetry was, sonnets with double and triple meaning words, they didn’t even need a title, just a number, like prisoners in a prison are limited in what they can say and have to fit their words in a certain form factor in the difficulty of making sense of long sentences resembling stream of consciousness which you regain if you pause during the reading, something I tried to do in this paper by breaking the letter starting on page 195, not breaking it like tearing it apart, just hitting the Enter key once in a while like you need to at the ATM to get your money all neatly stacked and you hope they’re new from the central bank anyway it’s interesting to break the poetry or what we think it is and then start making sense out of it, not like Stanley Fish would, but someone normal like the people on the street who would come across a book like that and wouldn’t know exactly where to start and where to end, which I didn’t know either because it became a very labor-intensive task all that typing, I’m sure it’s not like labor delivering a baby or hard labor like at the prison, but I had to look at the perspective of how long it could be before I could make any sense.

The good news, if there ever were any good news anywhere, as in I have good news and bad news, which do you want first, and you don’t know and you don’t like to be put in a situation like that at all, so you say for goodness sake say it: the text, just the text in which I hit the Enter key several times, it started having a poetic side to it like I wouldn’t want to touch it, you know, like I would rephrase everything, change the words, try something different, express the concept in a way that would make it clearer to you, my reader, and whoever else who would like to see associations that are close to what Derrida wanted to tell us but denied telling us, when words and expressions that you read here have meaning that comes from somewhere else or that is going to make sense when you read something else in the same chapter but maybe sometimes in another universe, that’s French for pardon me I don’t think it’s going to happen but you get the tip of the iceberg and you, the scholar turned interpreter from working on your car just changing the oil for the fluidity of the text, as when you get a good flush out of your system either from your bowels or just blowing your nose, you feel free again to make sense of what you read.

I didn’t want to make sonnets out of Bernadette’s letter but I thought I would take it and write a real poem, like the ones I read in the anthology, but no sir she started being poetic on me and out of respect for her I could not just say that’s the wrong way and I know better, plus she’s a real poet on the Internet you just google her and she appears on your screen at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/mayer/ as if you rang her doorbell and asked her to show you all her books, I mean those she wrote not those she has in her house that could take a long time to go through and the purpose of this paper is a bit more limited than that, not that I want to avoid doing homework but I just look at the calendar and the pages on it fly faster than I can read the big numbers, like Dickinson’s sonnets.

So here you go, I can always hope that it could help someone else appreciate the writing of Bernadette Mayer, people who could be put off by the seemingly prose that never ends and they can’t hold a thought longer than two or three lines, a bit like me in fact but I found that her writing could be enjoyable and resembled my way of thinking, somewhat nonsensical some people would say, but all the same when I sit on my kitchen counter and think of what I would like to write, this form feels very comfortable except that the thoughts I had while in the kitchen aren’t the same as when they come out at the tip of my fingers and that may be too bad, maybe that means I should get a tape recorder like those mad Hollywood people, I think they’re screenwriters and they’re wired up because they really want the glamour of being mentioned in white letters in a dark room and who knows if they could end up at that black-and-white Oscar ball.

Making Sense

The following pages contain excerpts from “Days, Stamps, Stamp Pads, ...” (Mayer), arranged in short lines to help the reader (me) visualize the poetics in it. I started with the first sentence and could split it in three stanzas in what I perceived as thematic units. As I read the resulting poem, new meanings surfaced (see the Notes in the column to the right) and I could argue that this first sentence on its own could be a poem. The second sentence was more difficult, perhaps because I wanted to see as much meaning as in the first one. At that point, there seemed to be a recurring theme of putting one’s thoughts in order, to line them up neatly as if that would calm the person (the speaker, author). Doing this, I realized that the text addressed the very issue of making sense in the way I was trying to do: line up the words, group them in a way they can associate with each other, like the task she describes of matching socks in a basket of laundry. I then described the process in the first paragraphs of this paper in the style I adopted from the experiment.

Because I had seen references in the last sentence to the images of the first sentence, I chose to repeat the exercise with it and try to make new associations. In this last sentence, we can confirm the mother-daughter relationship of trying to make order as we are haunted by our parents even if they are not living anymore. But then, the mother is made the same as the daughter “among the something arms” and trying to love “like saints” those who cannot be loved but should be just out of convention or social pressure (or the masculine pressure).

(p. 195)

Notes

Not arms, it couldn’t be arms

like loving arms

though it could be The Something Arms

as in and among the thought

of a hotel

and packing a bad bag*

really neatly to go there,

(6) packing a bad bag: presenting oneself at a hotel with a bad bag, or to go to someone with open loving arms and being aware of one’s appearance and personal “baggage.”

slides even, the accumulation of slides,*

color slides, photographic slides

you know what I mean,

putting them in order,

labeling them,

having slots in your desk to do so,

collecting pads and pencils,

unsharpened ones or ones that are unconscionably*

all sharpened at once,

some things many things never used at all,

just collected,

ties and socks to match

and judging* which ones will go with which ones,

(8) slides: memories?

(15) unconscionably: a play on “unconsciously” to include “unreasonably” in it.

(20) judging: recalls labeling to make order (in one’s baggage) to “sort it out.”

Collection of images, ties and socks to match as bits and pieces in one’s mind that one puts together judging which ones to use (in a poem).

subway tokens you collect in boxes,

you can only buy ten at one time

so you have to go and buy them many times

to get them all together*

to give them as a present for Christmas

to someone who might feel

he or she was being made happy

by the accumulation of such a gift,

just having them,

having all of them in one’s possession,

having a pile of them,

by the same token,

many tokens, as you used to say so often,

it might be better to just jump over the stiles.

(24) To get them all together:

collection (subway collection box, and see pads and pencils above); togetherness (Christmas, made happy); tokens (collected; of one’s affection; a keepsake; a sign; a poem or letter)

Does one really need “tokens” to reach out to another? Mayer’s letters are a sort of token gifts that one can collect, put together to see slides of her life, they are arms extended.

(pp. 195-196)

Notes

There was a crooked man

who walked a crooked mile

who found a crooked sixpence

upon a crooked stile,

and calendars

and all the days passed one past the other

lived together

all together in the crooked house

with all the consistently crooked things in it,

remember that?

Count the days,

pretend you’re in prison*,

it is like a prison,

you have to go to the bathroom every day,

you have to take a bath on Saturday

and wash yourself with a cloth on Wednesday all over,

there has to be order in the drawers,

I wish I could see it,

you can fold all the laundry

or the clothes for packing in a suitcase*,

isn’t it turning out neat,

you can’t be a heroin addict because that’s too sloppy

but you might not be able to forget*,

on the other hand,

enough to enable you to function anyway.

(46) See p. 200 “it’s more orderly you said to live in a convent” for associating prison and convent (take a bath on Saturday, order, neatness).

(54) suitcase: see “packing a bad bag” (line 6)

(57) forget: see memory associations (tokens, slides, etc.) stanzas 1-3

I don’t mean function,

move your bowels or something,

I mean just to get through the day

normally, you’ve been reminded

of everything too often,

now you are quite dumb.

(p. 199) (lines arbitrarily numbered)

Notes

101

105

110

115

120

125

130

135

140

145

150

155

160

165

170

175

180

You actually got off easier than your brother,

you were less forced because you were a woman,

his shoulders grew narrow

and he collected so many things,

he was a little endomorphic-looking*

or something,

you at least had the carriage

of a pride of lions

and I must admit

I don’t know that much more about you

except that since I imitated you*

I still can imitate you dying

and many of these cold gray mornings

are like the beginning of that scene,

what was it, was it just politeness,

why was it so detailed,

saying the novenas for you assuming

that the mathematics of the religious indulgences

and the big train into the future of hopeless cases

might work out in a saintly way,

it’s more orderly you said to live in a convent,*

you were thinking I guess

about all the unpredictable craziness of life

and even the demand that life makes that you

be sexy, or have sex, that love and sex can be

a free expression you get for free,*

you can’t predict it in all the disorder

in among that, in among

the something arms*

where you or I might be excited

and crying out in a rage that cannot kill,

knowing another person is human

and mute and dumb enough to want to be with you

in the anomaly of borders and boundaries*

that we were so good at delineating with our training,

making something out of nothing,

adapting to everything like admirable men and women

but this guilty feeling that we cannot speak freely

in intimacy for fear it will destroy the odious order

we’ve predicted for ourselves among

the safe control of just doing o.k.*

and getting everything done or straight in

private so we can continue on,

ignoring most of what exists not

as things we love but

as people whom we cannot count on,

who disappoint us and thus

though we love them we can always

find a reason not to let them have access

to what they call the self and

we can love them generously enough

like saints

but never apprehend them or take them to us

in all their chaos like people

because they are awful and don’t fit

into the day, the abdomen, the night, in which

we are sheltering babies born of them

but the babies are not like the cousins who

demand money and shake up the scene, or

the real babies who make other kinds of demands

and also act awful,

the unborn babies in our wombs are like

the pebbles of monkeys we can control and commune with

as if they were not only perfect

but ourselves

and they are not counted as real yet,

we can control them like pictures, *

we can show them,

we can show ourselves off,

we can forget everything but our bodies, *

and what is within them is a deception,

only you and I know about that,

there is no freedom in it because

it is expected and can be finally planned for

and the ones who love that sort of thing, well

we can seek them out

and get approval from them for it,

and from the other ones,

the ones who insist that life goes on,

well we can prove

it doesn’t because you can’t

account for that,

let me prove my faith

your heritage.*

(105) endomorphic relates to the shape of the abdomen, relating to pregnancy, but also the endomorph which is a mineral: see pebbles below.

(111) I imitated you ... dying ... saying the novenas: here we get the hint that the recipient of the letter is mother-like. The religious allusions would also confirm that we are talking about someone older and above the speaker.

(121) orderly ... live in a convent: see lines 45-55 for the prison analogy, and the need to be neat.

(126) a free expression you get for free: this and the lines around it put the desire for order imposed by our education and the need for free expression against each other.

(129) the something arms: see line 3, a room to make love.

a rage that cannot kill: the rage of making love.

(134) the anomaly of borders and boundaries: the limits of each individual that sometimes seem abnormal.

(141) the safe control of just doing o.k.: when one says she’s doing OK so there’s no risk of being asked any further questions.

(163) the pebbles of monkey: studies have been conducted to show monkeys can trade using pebbles (Surowiecki)

(167) control them like pictures: see slides lines 8-12

(170) forget everything but our bodies: what follows summarizes the poem in being prisoners of our bodies and having it influenced by our parents and family.

(184) your heritage: A signature, “I am the next generation and there’s nothing you or I can do about it.”

An Exercise in Condensing the Poem?

Each stanza from the first sentence could be set with little editing as a separate poem, or be combined as one. The last sentence proved more difficult to split. But given what we now know (if the interpretation should be taken seriously), could one extract lines from the long poem and still maintain its sense? The exercise may be worth trying: using a highlighter, highlight the lines you want to keep in the poem and see if Mayer’s exact words could be used in a condensed version of the poem!

Works Cited

Mayer, B., The Desires of Mothers To Please Others In Letters, West Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press, 1994.

Surowiecki, J., “Coup de Grasso” in New Yorker November 10, 2003, online at http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?031006ta_talk_surowiecki