The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters

by Bernadette Mayer

Lyn Hejinian writes of The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in This is a most remarkable and wonderful book, reinventing the genre of "letters by mothers" and extending it into a brilliant social mediation on the unpredictability and unboundedness of the responsibility we experience as desire. The work is precise, expansive, unabashed, melancholic, forthright, and metaphysical; it is about public and private history, good advice, speculation, news, and the ways understanding and adventure direct our attention and stimulate our manifold desire. "Bernadette" (the one in the book) is at any given point precisely and descriptively somewhere, and yet she is also everywhere; the simultaneity and scale-shifting of her attention as it runs through any given sentence is amazing. And yet the power of the resulting book is logical. For "mothers," the desire to please is always a prolongation of the power to please.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

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

[Bette Noir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful!

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a very odd reading experience. I read these letters at the pace of about one a day. I knew at the beginning that meant the book would take me between three and four months--so score, I beat my own pace! I cannot lie to you and say I enjoyed this book. It was largely a slog. A lot like pregnancy, though, so I appreciate the way the form echoes the content.

What I enjoyed most about this book were the letters engaged predominantly with the mundanity of life. What I enjoyed least were the letters that were so far out to the edges of the lyric and run-on sentence that they failed to reach me from their great remove.

Of note in this book is how much the world has changed since Mayer wrote it in 1979 and 1980. At some point, she mentions that because she and her husband both won NEAs, their move to this tiny town in NH so she could teach--and make a living--is actually more expensive than if they had just stayed put and she had presumably not had a good job. I compare that world to the world today where poets are all adjuncts and no one can get a tenure track job and the "prestigious" awards are inevitably bound up in exploitative institutions (looking at you, PoFo) and so competitive as to be pipe dreams. At another point, Mayer references a poet who gets shuffled about place to place, teaching job to teaching job, as her friends protect her, which reminded me of a story of a famous poet who survived in exactly this manner. Not a good teacher, just protected by friends and shuffled from guest prof to guest prof role. Who of my generation can do this? Who can offer this? The world Mayer writes about is entirely gone.

In short, a weird, long, at times tedious even while justifiably so, work of what is now firmly a historical depiction.

[Elisabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned that I love Bernadette Mayer. I got my first ever A+ writing about her.