Milkweed Smithereens

by Bernadette Mayer

A career-spanning bouquet of poems by the peerless and inimitable Bernadette Mayer Milkweed Smithereens gathers lively, wickedly smart, intimate, and indelible Bernadette Mayer the volume ranges from brand-new nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from her Covid Diary and Second World of Nature to early poems and sonnets found in the attic or rooted out in the UC San Diego archive. The world of nature and the pandemic loom large, as in her “The Lobelias of Fear”: …but how will we, still alive, socialize
in the winter? wrapped in bear skins
we’ll sit around pot-bellied stoves eating
the lobelias of fear left over from desperation,
last summer’s woodland sunflowers and bee balm remind us of black
cherries eaten in a hurry
while the yard grows in the moonlight
shrinking like a salary …

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2022

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

[katherine ⚢]

teetered between a 2 & a 3 because GOD there are some beautiful teethy bits in here but also WOW mayer needed an editor to sit her down and make her make sense. sooooo much pandemic talk and weird neoliberal virtuesignaling interspersed with poetry in peculiar ways. this book felt confused by its own nature.

[Jack Malik]

My first Bernadette Mayer Book.

Beautiful cover and nice typeset. The pomes in this collection are interesting—it challenges yr notion of “what is poetry?”

There are 16 pieces I love the most:

The Joys of Dahlias*
Obsidian Butterflies
Stephen Hawking
these rich areas of thought & time
Heart
I Am Your Food I Am Your Fate
Pi-Day
Don’t Forget Volcanic Salt
The Lobelies of Fear
No More Reading
The Cactus is Flowering
On the Wild Strawberries
I IMAGINE A POEM by bernadette mayer
Sonnet Bill DeNoyelles
Bear in Mind

*my absolute fave of this collection; left me smilling real good

[yunuen]

someone said it, lots of virtue signaling coulda done without - it's definitely everyone former writing mentor ranting about trump and birds she saw (no hate, i love birds). disjointed, definitely needed an editor BUT it's not her first work so i bet she's paid her time and she can write WHATEVER she wants now

[Sophie]

I do not like Covid media but I swear Bernadette lives in the future. Like…

“she looks down while
the window trembles
but she’s become a tree
out of her head comes
a tree that begins at the roof
safest place to be is the past”

[w3rmo]

Lowkey a flop!!!!

[adeline]

I can't tell if I didn't like this collection because it focused heavily too heavily on the early days of the pandemic and Trump for me or because it actually captured the murky anxiety too well that it made me dislike it.

There were some cool lines though, specifically the stuff that fell into the minute or imaginary.

"I'd be yellow-orange / like a word or a flamethrower..."

"there are signs saying / don't cut the trees down / but you fish here / but don't cut the fish down..."

"the stinkbugs don't make you feel / good or likeable..."

"I hear target practice from far away, it's / for probably shooting deer, bears and dinosaurs..."

"the sun's come out! now the sky's even weirder but yellow trees look yellower / (rewolley) it's even yellow backwards..."

All in all, I hope to one day be so old and prolific that when I write weird rambling stuff about politics (hopefully not politics though) people will be like "ah that's just Adeline" the same way people go "yeah that's Bernadette."

[Carey Calvert]

I could not pass on the title.

In this last collection of poems, the reader is embraced by and introduced to the work of Bernadette Mayer. The poet who celebrated the ordinary passed on November 22, 2022.

It is … a lure.

Milkweed is guaranteed to bring beautiful butterflies.

Smithereens – small pieces

For Mayer, “poetry didn’t have to be a thing in the middle of the page with a lot of white space around it.”

It could be anything – over the page, off the page, anything.

Like on page 31, in the poem Heart, “a slip of the tongue.”

Of “Memory,” perhaps Mayer’s most famous work, Tausif Noor wrote (Memory) “syncopates the ebullient and the mundane to approximate the unevenness of life’s passage.”

Much of the same can be said of Milkweed Smithereens.

From Art Has Lapsed We Know:

For what succeeds is silly maybe

For what succeeds is maybe silly

There might be nostalgia, emotion

There might be stuff unknown as death

Let something something something

Please, let something something something

The embrace of the messiness of everyday life

Mayer wrote of “the richness of life and time as they happen to us in tiny explosions.”

“That combination of major joys minor disasters and moments that float somewhere in between.”

What is found herein can be described as lively, carnal, and that which grows slowly, “the quotidian an endless source of fascination and material.”

Showy flowers

More or less poisonous

[Zoe]

a bit off the rails sometimes in an epic way sometimes in an offcolor and weird way...

bonus points for sillyness: "a monster crawled across the top of the hill where the evergreen tree is, it must've been three times the size of a mountain lion, darling, let's give it a sugar cookie 3x the size of itself"

favorite line: "poetry porch life for all." poetry porch life for all!!!

[Rodney Phillips]

This book is glorious. Here she comes again.
"we are having trouble with all the people
and firecrackers"

Firecrackers always!

or: Lines from "The Joy of Dahlias

Ahoy matey, I'm peeling your lollipop
dear darling and all that jazz, are you the

I am so happy in my bed beep beep who did it?

the blue bayou is bountiful, bonnie Esperance

but they're chewy, Mr. Cherubino Chickadee
and the cloudburst brother, Daniel and Jonas

sleep now, smart pants or the midnight dancer
will tutti frutti your fabulous memory
toodle-oo

Now, nobody taught to write like this nobody
in the first generation or Language people
She's sprung from Athena's cheek, fully flower
Her poems are homey for me. Happy gladiolus !!!

[Menno van Winden]

Or something, we even forgot what world we lived in / we couldn't sleep on any porch / We slept in old beds never made up for lack of time / we stopped answering the phone / Once in a while one of two poets would smile at us / in such a way as to make us remember / How we were supposed to be & what way to be & / what it felt like to be that way / And we began to hope that over the summer we could / get back to the lost minion / Or else we'd be bad, lost and not good, done in, / without love & dead

[Charlie]

Very not sure how I felt. Mixed - some of this connected with me (the Covid diaries in particular), and other stuff (possibly the older poems) often felt like intellectual exercises, with no resonance.

[L]

Milkweed Smithereens, pg.3
Shadow Biosphere, pg. 11
Stephen Hawking, pg. 13
From All Sides, pg. 16
Heart, pg. 31
The Lobelias of Fear, pg. 39
Conclusion, pg. 85

"safest place to be is the past", pg. 16 (From All Sides)
"an all-sex owl on the tree of life...", pg.80 (Carnival)

[Julie]

"What was my dream, who were its followers
Old morning, old warning of beauty,
Fear of love, I do not feel cold
Romance was once a luxury, now it's hard
To abjure this winter, even harder
To be so solemn about the weather
I think I'll forget my dream"

pg. 50

[Megan]

The poems felt disjointed to me and I found myself struggling to follow along. So I can't say that I enjoyed this body of work.

[Lindsey King]

Lost a star because the poems feel disconnected from each other and content about lockdown, to my surprise, doesn’t resonate much with me. But you know, beautiful otherwise.

[cori]

reread ⥀

[Rupert]

Final gifts from a wonderful poet. The Covid diary pieces are soothing for ptsd. The last poem is called “Conclusion”. The final line is “towards what’s new”.

[Victoria Tang]

Most of this went over my head and none of it clicked with me. Unfortunate for such a pretty cover.

[Rita]

Stinkbugs

[Sarah]

A delight, and it only took me so long to get through it because it is so dense and demands a minimum of distractions. I'd definitely pick up another book of poems by Mayer.

[Lily Kent]

I fooled myself into thinking I like poetry and this book put me back in my place

[Julia K]

some lines were really beautiful and some made me feel like i was having a stroke. also way too much liberal “i hate trump” complaining

[Amelia O’Halloran]

not for me

[Clara Martin]

Along with Maggie Nelson's Pathemata, this could go on a strange new shelf of pandemic books

[Rachel Kamphaus]

wow. this sucks. two stars because there’s one really good poem about eileen myles

[Delia Rainey]

i wish i could read more of bernadette mayer’s diaries
<3 3

[Goodreeds User]

Playful and direct and full of character! This is my first time reading any Bernadette Mayer and I'll definitely be back for more

[Frej]

Dör dödens död, älskade Bernadette, älskade de här små utdragen som också bara löpte igenom. Åh Conclusion !

[emma]

“there’s a butterfly on this machine, there’s a butterfly on every machine,”