Poet and teacher Bernadette Mayer has put out a call for poets to come out to her upstate New York house for weekend experimental writing workshops focusing on “investigations of traditional forms made new.”
Mayer is a legendary teacher, providing the catalyst for countless experimental movements large and small, from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E to Studying Hunger to countless dorm room parlor games.
A few samples from her list of writing experiments:
-Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in Science by finding out how
thought becomes language, or does not.
-Construct a poem as if the words were three-dimensional objects to be
handled in space. Print them on large cards or bricks if necessary.
-Write a work that intersperses love with landlords.

She’s also, of course, a poet with over twenty publications in forty years of public writing, the most recent Scarlet Tanager from 2005, and the most widely known The Bernadette Mayer Reader from 1992.
The weekend sessions are limited to four participants, and include meals and accommodations in Mayer and her partner Philip Good’s house, a former synagogue between Kinderhook and Tsatsawassa creeks at the foothills of the Berkshires.
According to the email announcement, “Bernadette Mayer will discuss her Experiments List and encourage participants to expand their poetics to greater levels. The central focus in the workshop will be in-depth Investigations of Traditional Forms Made New. In addition, each participant will receive constructive feedback about their overall work through individual consultation; and all participants will be given an expansive list of reading recommendations. At the conclusion of the weekend the group will collate their new poems into a stapled poetry magazine.”
Contemporary poets and essayists often cite Mayer as an important influence on a wide range of poets from Ted Berrigan to Harryette Mullen, curiously often as if she were not still alive and working.
Mayer suffered a stroke in 1994, and though she’s recovered, she continues to be in somewhat shaky health. Mentally, though, she’s reportedly as sharp as ever.
It’s curious—and surely quite complicated—that such a revered poet would be teaching out of her home to such a limited audience, but whatever the reasons, it would be a worthwhile experience for anyone interesting in expanding his or her poetic horizons.
Interested parties should email poetswksp@yahoo.com.

07.28.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

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