When the previous letter referred to the “ancient year” of 2020, it wasn’t really a joke. It’s not just the blurred sense of time brought about by the Covid situation. This letter is dropping on the one year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that, however unlikely, constantly threatens to spill over into something greater at a moment’s notice. The US has tried to rally the “democratic” world for its proxy war, but its success is limited to the traditional Atlantic sphere of imperialist powers. The Chinese state has been watching the Putin regime’s war carefully, while considering its own designs on Taiwan, the intermediate zone of the Pacific.
Spillover effects have been felt throughout the middle east as well, from repositioning in Syria as Russian forces move anti-air equipment, to Biden diplomatically securing a freeze in Zionist settler expansion.
All that to say, the external situation has been sharpening at a hasty clip.
Which is why 2020 subjectively feels so distant: back then it was the internal situation that had inflamed American society. The capitulation by Sanders in the Democratic primaries made it clear to everyone that even the most tepid reformism won’t be tolerated by the mainstream, and “work within the system” is the road to helplessness. The year was plagued with mass unemployment, slashed wages, and intolerable conditions for the “essential workers”—but at least everyone had more time to go out and protest the police lynching of George Floyd. And meanwhile the state and its bureaucracy put the needs of big business over public health.
It was quite a conflagration, until the Democrats and GOP performed their true function: absorbing the popular energy of the urban protests against the police and rural-suburban protests against the lockdown, and directing it toward the election. President Biden has proceeded to solidify and expand the major aspects of Trump’s foreign policy.
I don’t blame readers if this little editorial leaves them exasperated. Such a feeling was shared by the poet Bernadette Mayer, who passed away last autumn. Her last book Milkweed Smithereens is a low-key digest of poems from her whole career since the 70s, bound up with excerpts from a most recent prose project, a diary she kept during her Covid isolation period in East Nassau (Mayer was a Brooklyn-born longtime New Yorker).
Milkweed Smithereens reads as a cross-cut of lyrical pieces with these stretches of italicized lowercase prose. A formal narrative arc emerges: it seems more poems occur than prose pages initially, but at some point the diary begins to take up more space.
For all the concern it takes up with the same news cycle afflicting us all, Milkweed Smithereens only does so to the extent that it records the eclectic flow of material passing before the speaker’s consciousness. It’s not about analysis or pondering basic things. These are experimental poetic effects dealing strictly with the most “effective” things in day to day experience. In Mayer’s poetic world, as she says in the Covid diary, “for humans the thing to do is stare.”
Pragmatic avant-gardism
Mayer’s poetry gives a mysterious impression of being recognizably collaged together by granular phrases and ideas, and at the same time a surging, immediate, purely spontaneous “stream of consciousness.” The flow comes from her riffs on incidental sound patterns, similar to Joyelle McSweeney or Michael Lally:
vladimir nabokov said: i confess i do not believe in time in BEING AND TIME, poor heidegger didn’t finish the time part in time to publish it with the being part so everything-now must be not-being there is a pine needle stuck in the screen
Sometimes her poems think about science and space, but otherwise they aren’t about pondering the “damned questions” or heroic deeds. The main activities are walking through the woods, smelling flowers, preparing food—and most importantly, counting things. The opening lines of The Covid Diary focus on counting insects—“2 stinkbugs, 1 fly,…”—and a recent sonnet called “The Lobelias of Fear” begins with “there are maple trees, one, two, three / but wait there’s 5 more, 2 behind the bungalow / and lots in the poetry state forest”.
Counting things keeps the speaker focused strictly on what’s tangible, immediately to hand. A tiny quatrain inside the Covid diary voices a wish to be “something / the size of a squirrel” for then she wouldn’t need a president “or worry what is democracy!” The stream is nothing more or less than the first thoughts engendered by these impressions. It’s not materialism because philosophy would be superfluous introduction here. This is pragmatism as American as toast sticks with soft-boiled egg dip. Like Walden, only cozier inside, and scarier and hotter outside.
The Trumpian anxiety can be dealt with by considering only what can affect you right now. The pragmatic orientation to reality seems to be part of Mayer’s reasoning for why she writes. In the same Heideggerian riff from the Covid diary, she goes on to say: “the side nearest me must be the being side / the one farther away’s the time side”. What’s given is what’s before her nose and that may suffice for poetry. As a great quatrain from a poem called “I Am Your Food I Am Your Fate” goes:
in my poems I like to talk about what happens in my heart and I know I’m cold and selfish but it’s part of the art of learning to know that my world won’t go away it’s behind me every night it’s before me every day
Lockdown upkeep
The content of Mayer’s world is largely food and chores. If we don’t want to deal with political economy, there’s still home economics.
The title poem, which opens the collection, reads as an inventory of plants and herbs combined with some food writing: “a common roadside weed (syriaca) / called “silkweed” / from the silky down which surmounts the seed / used for making hats / […] the early pods, / alone or with purple fragrant flowers / may be prepared as fritters / or included in soups or stews.”
In other poems, clauses from cooking instructions seem to be cut-up among the discourse, like this recipe for natural sugar:
to make ribose / coat an interstellar dust grain / in water, methanol & ammonia ices / bake under ultraviolet light / from a young star / if you succeed / it will breathe / every thousand years
But of course the outside world can’t be completely ignored, and much of the Covid diary is still given over to reporting the news. One passage, in the middle of the collection, seems especially suggestive, flowing from the litany of 2020 worries, to details of nature and animals, and finally to the material processes of the domestic sciences, i.e. wrapping green tomatoes.
this journal is as confused, mixed up, as this time is—imagine trying to represent not knowing whether there’s school in the fall or if there are tests: the “president” has sent troops to cities with democratic mayors to quell the demonstrations about all the black people cops have shot & killed in other ways. in the field are patches of wild thyme or oregano, me, i mistype a lot of things, misheard black cherry as raspberry, wishful thinking.
[…]
now the leaves are rushing off the yellow tree, yeller gal, yeller gal, flashing through the night, […] if we’re going to skip seasons let’s have it be spring, 60°, perpetual like periwinkles […] we wouldn’t have to theorize about why. & the deer ticks would be gone. […] there’s a bear around near here; there must be confusion about hibernation.
[…]
i wrapped the green tomatoes in newspaper, rolled up the lovage in wet paper towels…
Political Botany
So does Milkweed Smithereens lead to some culminating point about this tumultuous social situation? Not really. That is, it doesn’t say anything terribly different from the rest of the consensus, especially in literary circles.
A paragraph from the Covid diary reads:
it’s sort of raining. everything’s wet. it rained all day, now it is so dark, it’s a simple thought: in a catastrophe the best & most mutual-aidish is brought out in people—who needs governments. some mistake was once made that we need leaders! leaders lead to monuments & they just have to be taken down. the future’s more in the past but what is this that’s happening now? the rain it raineth every day & it will never stop, this will be good for the tomatoes, just above the bird feeder is the blue sky, now thunder, no brainbows though
“Simple thought” indeed. This libertarian banality, like all the other thoughts, are simply equalized and flattened together into a homogenous “presence,” like the rain that may be purification or may be a plague.
This is not just a criticism about “preaching to the choir.” If philosophy beyond Mayer’s world is superfluous, so too perhaps is the poetics of the Language poetry tendency, or the New York school. This problem is common to our entire intelligentsia. You don’t have to master the thought of Judith Butler or Jacques Derrida to vote blue to “save democracy.” You just gotta be a milquetoast liberal!
A poem near the very end called “Untitled Poem” registers the “catastrophe” that had been worrying the prose diary, right from the first line: “from on there will be no fun”. It reads like a bizarre invective, an anger without direction, full of wishful curses like “you must live with trump forever in a casino / to create a nuclear summer-fall-winter-spring’s / no laughing matter, you’ll have nothing to eat / nothing will grow that’s edible” and becoming a Republican. The piece might be a tongue-in-cheek version of recent poems I’ve seen that are just mainstream political screeds rigorously broken into couplets or 4-line stanzas, their ideological stamping and flabby exposition brutally exposed. Form and content are helplessly, awkwardly divorced.
This is collage for a time of crisis and exhaustion. The poem breathlessly ends on the weird image of a hotel show “with music by a transgender trump look-alike / & a group of black break-dancers / performing their greatest hits FUCK WHITE SUPREMACY / & WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON? until the dressing gong rings”.
Mayer’s ludic technique culminates here as an apocalyptic carnival, but it’s clear the speaker of these poems would prefer a pastoral, to picking lovely flowers and herbs and strawberries in endless time.
Except time is running short.
Check out the utterly unique PaperBird’s YouTube piece on Mayer’s most famous book Midwinter Day.