Reading Bernadette Mayer's 25th Anniversary Edition of Sonnets

A review of the 25th anniversary edition of Bernadette Mayer's Sonnets (Tender Buttons Press 2014) is up at Omniverse, with a clever (and meaningful!) angle: reviewer RJ Ingram read the book the summer he turned 25.

But it wasn't the first time: "I have read excerpts from Sonnets in almost every poetry workshop I’ve taken. Reading Sonnets on its 25th anniversary with purpose the summer I turned 25 feels as surreal as walking around a museum containing the artifacts of my life that are dearest to me." More:

In her investigation of self, Mayer pries open the body to see where it hurts. “The Earthworkers’ God is Healed” summons “Two socialists I loved” who by the end of the poem have transformed into “Those two green birds who bite my fingers / Till I scream for identical help.” Like many of the characters in Sonnets, the socialists aren’t forgotten; they’re recycled energies. Mayer demands we forget them and rallies herself in attempt to, but arguably fails. The failure here works phenomenally well, allowing Mayer to end with the socialists, the green birds, and the sour feeling.

*

I first read the sonnet referred to as [You Jerk You Didn’t Call Me Up] [our link] on page 32 a few years ago for a class. I was outside and it was hot and I was having a particularly bad day. The mood I was in matched Mayer’s voice in the beginning lines:

You jerk you didn’t call me up
I haven’t seen you in so long
You probably have a fucking tan

The startling ending with the rather famous double couplet made my day and I had an iced tea to celebrate. It didn’t put me in a better mood (I don’t think Mayer was trying to do that) but the ending complicates itself with just enough irony to make anyone smile:

Wake up! It’s the middle of the night
You can either make love or die at the hand of
the Cobra Commander
______________
To make love, turn to page 44.
To die, turn to page 130.

*

With the release of Sonnets’ 25th Anniversary Edition, Tender Buttons also released Please Add to This List, a companion that includes a list of writing exercises, or “experiments,” written by Bernadette Mayer for her St. Mark’s Poetry Project Workshop. Her experiments are followed by poems, responses, and more experiments in conversation with Mayer and her list. I once gave a random page of Mayer’s list to a class I was TA-ing. One of my students returned with an extensive San Francisco scavenger hunt she went on several weeks before, adding many more things to find. When I said “sonnet” she thought “that time I did a human pyramid with strangers while on a scavenger hunt.”

By the way, looks like one can pay whatever one might want to download a digital addition of both Sonnets and Please Add to This List at Tender Buttons; Mayer's writing experiments are also up at PennSound. Find the rest of Ingram's review here.