Bernadette Mayer @DIA 14.11.17

Bernadette Mayer reads @DiaChelsea, November 14, 2017

with Jen Bevin, listen here

6 hours after Alice Notley read @Pratt, listen here

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Bernadette Mayer is the author of over twenty-seven collections of poetry including most recently Works and Days (2016), Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer (2015), and The Helens of Troy (2013), as well as countless chapbooks and artist books. She has received grants from Creative Capital, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. She is also the recipient of a 2014 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. From 1980 to 1984, she served as the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and has also edited and founded 0 to 9 journal and United Artists books and magazines. She has taught at the New School in New York City, Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, Long Island University, College of Saint Rose in Albany, and Miami University.

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Living in Tents of Farinaceous Grain

This year I’ve pitched a polenta tent

the tentpoles reinforced artichoke spaghetti

I eat oatmeal, then run barefoot

down to the widened kinderhook to see

if the blue heron will answer my whistle

It’s raining so hard my poncho

doesn’t protect me adequately so like a whizkid

I visualize, then drink the iced-coffee creek

Where, in the wink of an eye, I drown

Rising from the dead I join

everyone else who did that & we sing

dear fucking sun I aim

to shine / on all sentient beings                       like you

except those who own private property, amen