At Frieze, Bernadette Mayer on Her Pictorial Synesthesia

Bernadette Mayer writes about the poetics of synesthesia for the new issue of Frieze; she is the author of the "emotional science project," Memory, republished in full color by Siglio Press this spring. "If you are a synesthete and see letters as having colours, your colour for the letter A will always be different from someone else's," she writes. Referring to her own poem:

The poet here mixes the bleeding of a maple tree and the belching of the universe, delaying the quickness of your cosmic and ultimate happiness by a sudden change in temperature. The observer says there will be no delay, though the thought is slow, given that what we are observing (a maple tree, the universe) seems to know it is on display. Should we look? Many would avert their eyes, yet mostly we wonder at seeing. So, this becomes two-sided.

‘How long it seems till someone comes!’ says Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy (1320). There are too many people in the world and, at the same time, too few to be seen by us at a party, there is no party, there are too many goldfinches at the bird feeder, there is only one trout lily and no hepatica. The maple tree is bleeding.

My synaesthesia’s like a child’s picture book: the sun is yellow because S is, A is red, B is pink, but then E is green like free money, I say to anyone who will listen.…

Read it all at Frieze.