Midwinter Day

by Bernadette Mayer

Perhaps Bernadette Mayer's greatest work, Midwinter Day was written on December 22, 1978, at 100 Main Street, Lenox, Massachusetts. " Midwinter Day ," as Alice Notley noted, "is an epic poem about a daily routine." A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again: ". . . a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December//Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/That takes the bite from winter weather/And weaves the random cloth of life together/And drives away the long black night!"

Genres: Poetry, The United States Of America, Fiction, 20th Century, School, Read For School, Literature

120 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 1982

About the author

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. Mayer's record-keeping and use of stream-of-consciousness narrative are two trademarks of her writing, though she is also known for her work with form and mythology. In addition to the influence of her textual-visual art and journal-keeping, Mayer's poetry is widely acknowledged as some of the first to speak accurately and honestly about the experience of motherhood. Mayer edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci, and, until 1983, United Artists books and magazines with Lewis Warsh. Mayer taught at the New School for Social Research, where she earned her degree in 1967, and, during the 1970s, she led a number of workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York. From 1980 to 1984, Mayer served as director of the Poetry Project, and her influence in the contemporary avant-garde is felt widely, with writers like Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, John Giorno, and Anne Waldman having sat in on her workshops.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writer and artist Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day is a long poem set over, and supposedly written in, one day, December 22, 1978, carrying within it the deliberate echoes of similar texts Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses. Mayer subverts the tradition of the epic poem, instead of telling a conventionally heroic tale she examines her daily life as a poet and mother who, with her partner, left New York for small-town Massachusetts to raise two young children, Sophia and Marie. Mayer’s day’s carved into sections flowing from morning to night, framed by dreaming, the style and structure shifting as Mayer moves from describing half-remembered dream images to befuddled waking attempts to draw out some deeper Freudian subtext – a legacy of her interest in psychoanalysis – to family routines and rituals. There are no obvious dramatic episodes here, although there’s a sense of a life fraught with tensions set up by the frantic balancing of motherhood with a desire to write: chains of association, awkward juxtapositions, pouring orange juice or coaxing a small child into their winter clothes, then silently musing on the nature of language and its forms. A journey to the library and the grocery store provide a snapshot of small-town America, fuel shortages threaten library opening, the claustrophobic culture of the town’s a stark contrast to Mayer's previous bohemian New York circles. Mayer makes it clear that her family exists not as an insular unit but part of an intricate network of relationships. She brings in references to the news of the day, domestic terrorism, environmental anxieties, celebrity gossip. The result's both an immediate account of each aspect of her everyday existence, the picture books read, the meals made, and a painstaking work of memory, a repository for a specific historical and political moment. I found this fascinating, sometimes challenging, sometimes, in its representation of particular 1970s' attitudes, unexpectedly jarring but always compulsively readable, at once intimate and intellectually complex, wonderfully abstract and beautifully concrete.

[kaelan · Rating 4 out of 5]

ORIGINAL REVIEW (Oct. 29, 2013): Superficially speaking, Midwinter Day is almost everything I hate about contemporary poetry: free-versed, loquacious, banal (and indulgently so)... so on and so forth. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Bernadette Mayer's syntactically-scrambled sentences, when read a little more closely, have a tendency for exploding outwards in waves of heavy, focused meaning. Perhaps the comparison's a slight stretch, but it's kind of like how you can take almost any part of a Milton epic and subject it to microscopic analysis, uncovering something new and interesting in the process.

Nevertheless, it's not all readerly roses. For Midwinter Day is long. Long to the tune of 119 pages. And for certain neural-physiological reasons (no doubt), it remains a fact that close reading is impossible to sustain over prolonged stretchs of time. Yet unlike Paradise Lost, Mayer's poem is not a whole lot of fun to read when you're taking it in on a purely aesthetic-level. That is, provided you're the kind of person who reads Paradise Lost for aesthetic pleasures. But if you are, you're probably also the kind of person who could get something out of this poem.

On a marginally related note, I've been reminded of an interpretive strategy proposed by German electronics guru/radio artist Felix Kubin. "Every time I am undecided about something," he once told an interviewer,

I'd rather decide to do it than not to do it. And if I can't find a system to understand something, but it fascinates me, I keep listening to or watching it [or reading it] in order to understand. Often, after a year or so, it becomes one of my favourite works.

A solid philosophy. And it's why I plan on someday returning to this strange, tedious and perplexing work of poetry. ***/5

UPDATE: On December 22, 1978, Bernadette Mayer penned Midwinter Day in its entirety. Exactly thirty-six years later, I decided to (re)read the poem under comparable circumstances.

It had been about a year since I first trudged my way through Mayer's long poem, and yet I found that my general impressions hadn't changed much. It still struck me as esoteric, sporadically lyrical, and (at times) quite trying on the ol' attention span. But I also found that I had a greater appreciation for Mayer's overall project—of creating an epic about domesticity and routine.

And this is perhaps what makes Midwinter Day so simultaneously attractive and alienating: that more than any other literary work I've ever read, it impressed upon me a set of values and worries that weren't my own. For even though I'm a bespectacled young atheist from the 21th century, I fancy that I can on some level relate to the puffed-up masculinity of Homer, the imaginative theology of Milton. But tantrums, grocery bills, daycare—even if I can identify with such things, it still feels somehow wrong to immortalize them in poetry...

Yet that's precisely the point, isn't it? As I read through Midwinter Day for the second time, I began to realize that my own approach to literature was founded upon untried assumptions, that it was steeped in ideology. Poetry—I always used to tell people—took you outside of yourself. For me, Midwinter Day did just that, and the result was profoundly unsettling.

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Choose your poison...

My Review, as poem:

The Day's

A book by Bernadette Mayer
that I admire on a morning in late Fall
upon a day in midwinter
that goes mid-way
from poetry's prose to prose poetry
and through a century
of differently graded pencils, a way from
roses are violet to roses are
				roses, or
as violence does a day good, a day's end
is in a sort of
			dream's hay
spun to a rhythm and a play
conforming to its circular path
upon the footpath that leads away
to only leaves left undisplayed
though large as my papa's hands are
palms stretched all that ways back
to the age of 4
			a counter rewinding, re-
wound in my child's mind's black bank
shuttered like seconds are in frames
we each are each
what we remember of that day--
a day's so easy lost
in the shuffle of day-today
a momentary lapse, obscured
in that comment, a look
that quickly gains in significance,
that look, a comment
becomes itself the day
the week the month the winter
and a winter's gone
			to its grave--
I did hold it so long
but holding on's not fixed my place
in this going on, forth and back
what is it that
in 'Vertigo' takes the stairs
down and up at the same time
			is what
puts me here reading Midwinter Day
in August not December
as I should
 I read and I walk
look up from page to page
to where I'm going, in form--the walk
made of pedestrians, cyclists on
the Beltline path newly laid 
across the mid-metro belly
			my foot has a way
of knowing the words I read are moving
ambiguous, not forward, not back
like a ship on a ship's deck
or that 'Vertigo' thing again
that sense when I'm pulling out
of my parking space
and the other's pooling in
in that space--
a place in time
			without referring
I float, memoryless--or
all memory--only
what matters isn't the land
as land is sea too
broken imperceptible over
a breaking sense of senses shifted during flight,
what is there
		to return to
				but
the day?
the day is a procession
 minute hours go by second by second
a procession without meaning, a 'process',
only what I see, I hear
the surface area of that experience--
breakfast, lunch, dinner
(the sound of the fork is silver!)
a six-course meal
(depends how you break the line)
is consumed hand to mouth, bite to bite
(and a car is covered in a tarp)
it is what makes meaning possible--
		these meaninglessnesses
that build on seeming
(let be be finale, etc.)
that builds a day so long
so precise--twenty four--
as agreed upon
by whom or what we don't remember
				any more
than what year it was
made such an impression on Miss Mayer
that twenty-second of late December
when she was alive
(she's still alive (Thank God, we love you Miss Mayer))
				we know 
all there is to know
but when the evidence is laid out
like a patient etherized upon a table
(oh but what patient, what table,
what day was he or she admitted under what circ-
 umstances?)
that white of the white table
medical, sanitary, saintly
the white snow of December
brighter than the sun it gets its brightness from
that bright ether
it seems something's missing
		the day has escaped
the day--it is no longer
an accumulation, but, undetected
I see the scene quite well
through a closed opening
without my eyes open
		without finding my feet
it is in there in the air
the procession consists of pauses
that make an event an event by separating
the event from the event that follows the event
 it is this I worm into
 into the day
(though the day is nothing
nothing separated from nothing
 by nothing--
the ether of the day dissipates) the ever-
divisible units of matter divide
(atom's a lie, Adam too
in that garden filled with frogs)
				full up
nightly mating (sounds as though the sun's gone 
 down)
this as good as any
undifferentiated day
		is from green to red
		but a shade--
		orange and yellow
		a shade
of the season that is Fall
in which I look forward to--and backwards too
to--that midwinter day

by me (Jimmy) in homage to a truly great poem

My Review, as prose:

A few years ago, some friends and I formed a group called ZooPo. We were a 'literary movement' consisting mostly of University of Arizona poetry MFA students, but also some outliers (like me). We didn't exactly have a 'philosophy' or a manifesto or anything, but we did have a sort of general attitude, which I'm not sure we ever spelled out. Guiding principles if you will. First, we were light-hearted, didn't take ourselves too seriously (but in a good way, not a self demeaning way). Secondly, we liked to write about animals (thus the name). Third, we tried to push ourselves with various constraints, challenges, etc.

One of our constraints was we wanted to write a book of poems in one day. This idea came to us from the book Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer, which apparently she wrote entirely on December 22, 1978. We did this relay style, for a week. The first poet would write for a day (and we had several things each poet had to do in the course of the day, to add to the challenge, like visiting the zoo, or visiting one of the other ZooPo poets), and we had a baton that the poet would pass on to the next poet at the designated hour, whereupon the next poet will try to write a book of poems in the next 24 hours.

At the time Midwinter Day was just a concept to me, and I imagined a book that was more accomplished as ours, but still an experiment, so having many of the flaws that our books did. Well, yesterday I read this book and it is no longer a concept to me. Instead it is a brilliant long poem, probably one of the best ones I've read.

Reading it now, it seems to me the written-in-one-day thing is much less of a big deal than the actual poem. In fact, I doubt it was written in one day (it took me all day just to read it, it is 120 pages long). But I feel like that's really not the point. The point is that it is about one day, from waking up from dreams to going to the post office, to lunch, dinner, putting the kids to sleep, and back to sleep and dreams. It continues the tradition of books like Ulysses (the poem has the same first word "Stately") and Mrs. Dalloway, but blends it with the personal and the poetic. Like Ulysses, each of its six parts is written in a slightly different style. And like others who try to contain everything in a day, it seems Whitmanian in its need to catalog everything at times, but that categorization is musical. Some may find these sections boring, but I feel they are extremely important, and enjoyable if read aloud. What day does not have its trivial prosaic moments?

But most of this is soaring with great lines. This is from the first section (which is mostly about waking up from dreams):

 Now that our days
Are full of normal parts
It seems we have all lived forever so far
Eyes open, eyes closed, half-open, one eye open
One closed to the coming day, past's insistence,
Dream's vivid presence, no one knows why
Though you can see all I say with half an eye
I always have an eye to fascination, you catch my eye
 This meditation
Not on sleep but on awakening
With dreams with everything quickening, you and I
Survive this work and rest, not so much lost,
We only seem to dream as quickly as we live
One for the other to make up time
 And it's as if
Today I had someone else's dreams
Everything's the reverse of what it seems

Typing this out I noticed how the poem works so much better as a whole, pulling out sections or lines does not do it justice as it reflects upon itself and doubles back on its own themes time and time again to create this wonderful effect. This poem is also often funny and playful. At least to me. In little ways that make me smile. In ways that don't come through in excerpts. Oh well. Here's part of the second section, which as you see is written in a different style (and also affected by the children's waking up and their speed/rhythm/logic/language):

Look at this, see, you do, which one are you. The book is said to be a duck. The color wheel reflecting you hiding, the bus, empty green swing for people, smiling tiger nothingness puzzle, empty-eyed monkey mask right there, battered stolen musical egg, look, bright old playgroup radio playing raindrops and so on, there's something about a thermometer you wouldn't understand yet, silly identical grounded queen bees, you put things into things now, you empty cups and trucks on your own articulating oh and no the same, grabbing for the fifteenth-century Dutch woman who looks chiding, that's why I put her up, that polar bear won't go into that nesting cup.

So many more great sections. I can't share them all, or do them justice in little pieces, but here's part of the end of section 5:

 I know you speak
And are as suddenly forgiven,
It's the consequence of love's having no cause
Then we wonder what we can say
 I can say
I turn formally to love to spend the day,
To you to form the night as what I know,
An image of love allows what I can't say,
Sun's lost in the window and love is below
Love is the same and does not keep that name
I keep that name and I am not the same
A shadow of ice exchanges the color of light,
Love's figure to begin the absent night.

[Mark Desrosiers · Rating 1 out of 5]

A calm sentence like a story. I used to know a man who had a dog and I followed their steps in the snow, I got into the habit of walking just as far as they did every day. At the same time I also knew a woman whose husband had seven guns. I used to know a woman who's the woman who married Neil Simon. I like the woman who used to work in the Lenox market, she never wears boots, then she retired...

I can't go on. I know Mayer's heart was in the right place -- and I'll probably receive a Christmas lump of coal for pointing this out -- but this is one long droning proto-yuppie diary entry utterly devoid of mystery, music, strangeness, or ambiguity. Even her dreams (apparently a framing device) would put a community college couch therapist to sleep. I laughed aloud when she said "Let me tell you / The titles of all the current books", and then actually lists a buncha seventies books in pseudo-poetic order ("Delta of Venus, the Women's Room, / Ladies Man, Six Men, The Water-Method Man, Watership Down, / The Night People, Shepherds of the Night..."). Almost a parody of what poetry should never become.

But again, her heart was in the right place. Which makes me wonder whether great poetry only arises when your heart is in the wrong place (Dickinson, Whitman, Hart Crane, Berryman), or if you have no heart at all (Frost, Bukowski, Dugan).

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 5 out of 5]

my life is fucking different is fucked different now that i've read this you idiot clouds. call me storm leather or don't bother to try my desire at all.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

there's nothing more poetic than talking about how much you love your friends

[Ygraine · Rating 2 out of 5]

honestly, i found this literally & emotionally Opaque, sometimes illegible ?

i think stream-of-consciousness is Interesting because it can cause beautiful, unexpected little collisions of image and meaning ! i think those surprising word-meetings, the things they deny, the possibilities they create, are Good, actually ! but i can't help wishing that i didn't have to read everything in between.

i liked this passage, though:

"if we’re all wrong about everything, the life so short and the craft so long to learn, the assay so hard, so sharp the conquering, the dreadful joy that passes so quick and then being left alone again, what i mean is love astonishes my feeling with its wonderful working so ardently so painfully that when i’m thinking about such certainty i don’t know like the earth if i’m floating or sinking."

[Christopher Moltisanti's Windbreakers fan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not being hyperbolic. But this is one of the greatest works of American contemporary poetry and should be read by everyone who has any interest in the absurdity and beauty of surrealism. Specially at a time like this when waking up to reality what Breton considered as nightmare, has become a tiresome work.

[Frank Keizer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een episch gedicht over een dagelijkse routine, noemde Alice Notley dit boek van Bernadette Mayer, geschreven op 22 december 1978. Dromen, het seizoen, zorg, boodschappen, natuur, Nathaniel Hawthorne, New England, dichters, herinneringen en natuurlijk liefde. Ik denk dat de lectuur van dit boek een jaarlijks ritueel wordt op deze dag.

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was so sure that this was going 100% over my head for the first ten or so pages when she’s describing her dreams, but as I sank into it I realized I kinda love it? Bernadette (allegedly) wrote this entire 120-page poem over the course of December 22nd, 1978, and it’s her whole day, from waking up and telling her husband her dreams, to taking her kids on a walk around town, to describing the streetlight outside her window keeping her awake at bedtime. It sounds very mundane and it IS, which is what makes it extremely Joeycore. It’s just what’s running through her mind all day! She gives a history of her town in Massachusetts, there’s lots of musings about different kinds of love and being a writer, lots of talk about her poet friends… Feels almost like a very sweet book-length essay when she’s writing in bigger free-versey paragraphs, and then much hazier and more opaque when she’s writing in more traditional poetry forms. Love so much to read her writing about her two kids… I do not want to be parent to a child at any time in the near-future but I love to read her writing about her children and how they talk and how they play together. :,)

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The inside-out of Bernadette Mayer seeing what she sees, knowing what she knows, reflecting in and upon and out with the speed and wit and warmth that only a voice like hers can accomplish.

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“Wait!
I thought I was going to talk about reading and writing
And not the desire to renew love to life
In proportion to obsession by endless fucking”

“What is a story
Can I say that here”

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

(read for class)

so I think this is 3-star writing but a 5-star project and I’m really glad that I had to read it. Bernadette Mayer really did just sit and write all of this in one day, which feels buck wild to me. so often I feel like I am head empty, no thoughts; it would be so so so impossible to write anything, but this book gave me a lot of freedom: there is more going on in my head than I give myself credit for, and why shouldn’t I be allowed to write about them?

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was introduced to this book by the lead assistant to the professor for Coursera's and UPenn's course Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, who generously spent part of her Midwinter Day (and a couple of preceding days) this year leading a discussion of the book on the ModPo forums. I have read most of the book at least twice now, and I feel like I'm only beginning to discover it. There are passages on just about every page that leave me in absolute awe of the poet. The book is a long poem that was supposedly written in one day, on December 22, 1978, and is a moment by moment account of her day that beautifully captures her internal experience of each moment from pre-waking dreams to ordinary events of the day, and back to dreams again - but it is much more than that. In the end, I think it is a celebration of life in all its mundane, boring, and repetitive glory.

There is a lot in the poem about cycles, starting with the title, which refers to the marking of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and the traditional death of the old sun and the birth of the new. Mayer expresses a certain ambivalence about the cycles of her own life - her home, her town - day after day the same sights, the same relationships, the same actions - and yet there is something profoundly wonderful in every moment. I think the whole poem could be seen as a quest for what that something is, and in the final stanzas I think she shares the answer that she found. After all the introspection, all the close examination of her internal life, all she remembers of it is love.

From dreams I made sentences, then what I've seen today,
Then past the past of afternoons of stories like memory
To seeing as a plain introduction to modes of love and reason,
Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season
Now I've said this love it's all I can remember
Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December

Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light
That takes the bite from winter weather
And weaves the random cloth of life together
And drives away the long black night!

This book will not suit everyone, but if you enjoy modern poetry, or if an introspective contemplation of daily life with family and friends appeals to you, I highly recommend it.

[StrangeBedfellows · Rating 1 out of 5]

I suffered through this book when it was assigned in American 20th Century Poetry. This book is a prime example of why I don't care for a) American literature, b) American poets, c) 20th century poets, and d) any torturous combination of the three. Little more than pages and pages of free-writing, Mayer would like to pass this off as some innovative, poetic experiment. I say, not.

[Clara Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to read this again on December 22 and then I want to read Bernadette Mayer's Memory each day in July and then I want to name a daughter Bernadette. Even if it feels like the wrong time to have been reading both of these books - it is neither summer nor winter - maybe it was not so wrong because I just now realize it I am finishing Midwinter Day and Memory on the eve of Bernadette's birthday.

[Kayla · Rating 2 out of 5]

Almost painful to trudge through. I understand the point of free verse, but this experience felt more like someone hit autofill on their phone and just accepted whatever words appeared. By the end, I didn’t realize how much I truly missed having a period to end a sentence… Perhaps experimental poetry from the date, December 22, 1978 isn’t for me.

[Rupert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like a lot of great poetry this book makes you feel like you have a warm private audience with the writer and their soul. Many approaches to showing what makes a life and what makes it worthwhile.

[ShanTil]

Intriguing concept, but realized very quickly that reading an extended vivid dream sequence in poetic language (and that was only Part 1) was just not going to be my cup of tea. DNF.

[Erica]

love love love love love. favorited

[Madeleine]

ulysses could actually never! a formally brilliant epic of a quiet day in new england on the solstice. a woman poet prepares her home and family as christmas day draws closer — picking up library books thinking about frank oharas death off fire island, looking for groceries remembering the shopping mall with a fake park inside, listening to the uninhibited, absurd comments of her kids and marveling at them. the associations and dreams of everyday life pile up like snow accumulating into a wintery haze of love and creation. part 5 was my favorite for how its form devolved from narrative sentences to the romantic couplet. what a gorgeous love poem 💌

[Maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeah leave it up to a woman to write 120 pages of her morning to night routine

[chloe]

hated every second 😍😍

[Carolyn]

I loved this, and I rarely read poetry of my own volition. An epic poem about an ordinary day in the life of the poet and her family, it’s an experiment and an experience more than anything else. While not always beautiful, I was surprised to find it so funny, original and compelling.

[Melany Dillon · Rating 2 out of 5]

The work starts off a little slow, and continues to trudge along until the end. Most of the pages are filled with trivial things: the speaker chopping onions, having a beer, and playing with her kids. It's banal enough to make us wonder what exactly is the nature of this unfamiliar work. Eventually, Mayer addresses the purpose of it in the final page: "From dreams I made sentences, then what I've seen today, / Then past the past of afternoons of stories like memory / To seeing as a plain introduction to modes of love and reason, / Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season / Now I've said this love it's all I can remember / Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December." So, Mayer wrote this as a tribute to memory, love, reason, and a single day in the thick of Winter. I'm not sure if this makes the work more meaningful since the reason for its existance has become more explicit, or less meaningful since part of its mystique has been deconstructed. Regardless of this, it doesn't pack a punch. In other words, it doesn't really stand for anything, except maybe a commitment to the idea that even the boring, monotenous events in life are appropriate material for literature. There's insightful lines here and there, sure, but they often get lost amongst the chatter about groceries or how the snow looks outside. When the day turns to night and Mayer ends the epic poem, we don't really know what was particularly significant or meaningful about December 22nd. We may know everything about that one day, but we've sacraficed gathering a sense of what it meant.

[Brice Montgomery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Experimental poetry is such a tough sell—It forces the reader to engage with it as an object rather than a text, and it requires them to rethink the relationship between form and content.

To put it another way, this book was weird.

Written in a single day, "Midwinter Day" alternates between feverish intensity and dreamlike detachment as it recounts the titular day. Mayer is not, however, interested in the kinds of cozy tropes we might associate with winter. Instead, she presents the reader with an endless string of names, events, and references that are stripped from their context and situated in crumbling syntax.

After adjusting my expectations for the poem, I viewed this approach as paralleling the experience of stepping outside your door after a fresh snowfall—Everything is blanketed and begins to take on new forms as the snow collects, melts, and reshapes our relationship to the world. There's something comforting in that instability.

The only theme that emerges with some lucidity is love, as if it is the only constant in this misremembered winter day, and Mayer includes a few mic drop-level turns of phrase that land as sweet instead of saccharine due to how cold the surrounding text is.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic example of Bernadette Mayer's interest in time and perception. In an attempt to write down every thought she has in a single day, Bernadette ends up getting sidetracked down different alleys of memory and belief, her personal life intrudes on the purity of her mental life, and the two blend together into a sort of philosophical soup. Similar to Studying Hunger and Memory, this book has a somewhat more lyrical bent. I might add that this work is infinitely more satisfying than any of Kenny G.'s experiments, partly because Mayer allows herself to be distracted from her progeam, and partly because her mind is so much more interesting than his. oops. Did I say that?

[Raymond Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I try to read Midwinter Day with a group each year, such regard I have for Bernadette Mayer and her many contributions to poetry as a craft. I don't always succeed but I did in 2021, with a group out of New York, St. Rocco's.

Much of the epic poem reads like a news reel of the late 70's, a listing of other poets and writers, a catalog of scientific developments and achievements, all interspersed with truly great poetry.

Spoiler alert: the poem ends with a delightful 14-liner, a sonnet bringing order to a chaotic world as it enters the darkness and uncertainty of a long winter.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult to rate Mayer's experiment. It took fortitude to get through this bad-boy and I finally finished on December 22nd--so fitting. Here are some of my favorite gems:

"Now that our days/ Are full of normal parts/ It seems we have all lived forever so far...And it's as if/ Today I had someone else's dreams."

"Winter one better do me one better one faster one ice one day"

"I wonder why we write at all/ These trees have seen all this before/ But they are glad of an encore"

[Laura T]

What a treat to read, reminded me of the time we attempted a road trip to New Brunswick, stopped at a gas station by the border and found the sweetest sour candy you’d ever taste, you liked them more than me and on our way back insisted we stop again but we got lost down the road and you’ve never tasted anything since.