#Monica mcclure word writer how to#

The word 'Bernadette' appears in the book 25 times, as in: 'There is much I don't remember but there is much not worth remembering and there is what I will remember today remembering as Bernadette remembers.' Thanks to Mayer, we know how to make a book by telling our dreams, writing in bed, detailing bodily aches and longings, using proper nouns, describing the sky, walking into town, shopping, making meals, and remembering while living while writing. Throughout Midwinter Constellation, we reenact her methods, often in direct dialogue with our foremother. The opening stanza features a 'daughter / now wiggling out,' the image of an actual poet's actual daughter, but also an apt metaphor for our collective emerging as Mayer's self-appointed heirs. We begin with dozens of pages of poet-speakers in bed with lovers, children, pets, devices, books, and coffee. All the intimacy that I'd go to social media hoping to find, only for it to be turned into a product or otherwise rebuked, was there in the shared documents. Where were the textures of people's real lives in the infinite scroll that is designed to starve us of a desire for belonging, meanwhile mimicking the appearance of connection? In the end, I experienced our virtual collaboration as a sort of anti-feed.

I was trying to borrow some of the book's power to reanimate the social life of poetry, now so often diluted and distorted, sapped of any possibility of meaningful exchange, because of social media. 1 Later, I understood that I had been addressing a deprivation. I wanted to find out all over again whether, and how, 'the day like the dream has everything in it,' as Mayer writes. In writing our homage, Midwinter Constellation, I also hoped to understand more fully - not by analyzing, but by reenacting - the magic of Midwinter Day. Proof that this lack of recognition persisted had arrived in the summer of 2018, when AWP rejected my panel proposal for a 40 th anniversary celebration this snubbing only further fueled my desire to show how important the book is to so many poets - and to poetry. I'd proposed the collaboration first of all as a way to bring attention to Midwinter Day, still 'one of the unacknowledged masterpieces of late-twentieth-century writing in English,' as the Dictionary of Literary Biography put it decades ago. We composed or copy-pasted alongside each other all day, dozens of cursors blinking in a virtual happening. On December 22, 2018, the 40 th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer's writing of her epic of dailiness, Midwinter Day, 31 women poets joined me in typing into six Google Docs labeled Dreams, Morning, Noontime, Afternoon, Evening, and Night, following the six-part structure of Mayer's book.

Monica mcclure word writer