From The Blog
2 December 2022
Bernadette Mayer died on 22 November, aged 77. Earlier in the month, New Directions published the career-spanning collection Milkweed Smithereens. In ‘The Joys of Dahlias’, a nonsense taxonomy of sensual feelings inspired by flowers, Mayer writes:
sleep now, smart pants or the midnight dancer
will tutti frutti your fabulous memory
toodle-oo
I don’t know who the midnight dancer is, but if I’m up late, grinding away for some deadline or other, they’re someone I might hallucinate. Listen how lovely Mayer’s invented verbs are: ‘tutti frutti’ could mean to chop up, desiccate and sweeten, like the ice-cream topping, or to reduce your ‘fabulous memory’ into little more than a rolling playback of Little Richard’s rock and roll squeal. (‘A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom’ might be sound poetry produced in the witching hour, the cry of an insomnolent artist under pressure to make a hit.)
2 December 2022