Midwinter Day Reading

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Photo courtesy of BernadetteMayer.com

Bernadette Mayer

Bernadette Mayer is seventy-three, though, as Daniel Wenger observed in The New Yorker, her poems have a fragmented, informal feel that’s not out of step with a text message. Looking farther back, Mayer is also frequently compared to Gertrude Stein. However you slice it, her style is as politically and culturally contemporary in 2018 as it was in 1978, when she published Midwinter Day, a book of prose and poetry that catalogs a single December day. Now, no indie film project is more readily green-lit than one that freeze-frames an ordinary day, but a Homeric account of domestic life was then—and still is—radical. Diurnal activities like going to the library, taking care of her children, and writing are divided into six careful states of consciousness: dreams, morning, noontime, afternoon, evening, and night. To celebrate the landmark book’s fortieth anniversary, marathon group readings are taking place across the country. One of them is at Lump in Raleigh, where you can slip into Mayer’s stream of consciousness as a writer or a reader. —Sarah Edwards