Papers of Bernadette Mayer, writer, teacher, editor, and publisher. Most often associated with the New York School, Mayer uses compositional methods such as chance operations, collage and cut-up. Materials include correspondence with writers, artists, publishers, and friends; manuscripts and typescripts; notebooks and loose notes; teaching notes; audio recordings and photographs; and biographical materials such as calendars, datebooks and ephemera.
Bernadette Mayer Papers, 1958-2017 (MSS 420)
Restrictions: Original audiovisual media and unprocessed digital media are restricted. Viewing/listening
copies may be available for researchers.
Extent: 30.0 Linear feet (70 archives boxes, 1 card file box and 7 oversize file folders)
Bernadette Mayer was born on May 12, 1945, in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. from the New School for Social Research in 1967, shortly after which she began teaching there on a part-time, semi-permanent basis. From 1967-1969, Mayer and conceptual artist Vito Acconci edited the experimental journal 0 to 9, which published work from experimentalists in a range of genres and media. In the early 1970s, Mayer lived with film-maker Ed Bowes, with whom she collaborated on numerous projects. In 1975, Mayer married writer and publisher Lewis Warsh, with whom she had three children. Warsh and Mayer collaboratively edited United Artists press, which published a number of seminal books of poetry, including Ted Berrigan's Sonnets and Mayer's own Utopia.
Throughout the 1980s, Mayer was director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York where, as well as teaching writing workshops, she produced the Poetry Project's reading series. Mayer's position made her a central figure in the community of artists and writers gathered at that time in New York City's Lower East Side, and many of her students from this period—Lee Ann Brown and Lisa Jarnot among them—have gone on to become writers themselves.
As a writer, Mayer is most often associated with the New York School, a rubric which refers to composers, painters, visual artists, conceptual artists, and choreographers in addition to writers. Mayer's use of compositional methods such as chance-operation, collage, and cut-up identify her as an artist pursuing concerns similar to those of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low or Frank O'Hara—central figures in the New York School—as well as more contemporary figures associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing. But Mayer's work is also significantly influenced by modernist figures such as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, as well as by her background in classical studies, evident in her syllabi, reading lists and in her informal translations of Catullus.
Mayer's publications include: Ceremony Latin (1964), Story (1968), Moving (1971), Memory (1975), Studying Hunger (1975), Poetry (1976), Eruditio ex Memoria (1977),The Golden Book of Words (1978), Midwinter Day (1982), Utopia (1984), Sonnets (1989), The Formal Field of Kissing (1990), A Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992), The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994), Proper Name and Other Stories (1996), Another Smashed Pinecone (1998), Two Haloed Mourners (1998), Scarlet Tanager (2005), The Cave (with Clark Coolidge, 2008), Poetry State Forest (2008), Ethics of Sleep (2011), The Helens of Troy, New York (2013), and At Maureen's (2013).
The Bernadette Mayer Papers document Mayer's career as a writer and teacher and, to a lesser extent, her career as a publisher and editor. Additionally, the papers reflect the broader community of artists and writers known as the New York School. Materials include correspondence from writers, artists, publishers, and friends; notebooks and loose notes; manuscripts and typescripts of Mayer's works; teaching notes; audio recordings and photographs; and biographical materials such as calendars, datebooks and ephemera.
Accession Processed in 1998
Arranged in eleven series: 1) BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL, 2) CORRESPONDENCE, 3) WRITINGS, 4) NOTEBOOKS, 5) WRITINGS OF OTHERS, 6) TEACHING MATERIAL, 7) EDITING MATERIAL, 8) EPHEMERA, 9) PHOTOGRAPHS, 10) SOUND RECORDINGS, and 11) ORIGINALS OF PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPIES.
Accession Processed in 2019
Arranged in four series: 12) BIOGRAPHICAL, 13) CORRESPONDENCE, 14) WRITINGS, and 15) TEACHING MATERIALS.