Called "a consummate poet" by Robert Creeley, Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. A most prolific poet, her first book was published at the age of twenty-three. Many texts later she continues to write progressive poetry from her home in East Nassau, New York. For many years Mayer lived and worked on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she was the Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project from 1980-1984. Bernadette Mayer has received grants and awards from PEN American Center, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, the NEA, The Academy of American Poets, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
"Love and the seasons and the exigencies and opportunities of daily
survival are the inevitable occasions of a body of work that is as
radical as it is Horatian, able as little else is both to delight
and instruct."
*Edwin Frank - Boston Review*
"One of the most interesting, exciting, and open of
late-20th-century experimental poets."
*Tom Clark - San Francisco Chronicle*
"Bernadette Mayer is one of the most original writers of her
generation… All her work is full of brilliant observation, humorous
and sometimes astounding conclusions, and amazing juxtapositions
inspired by linguistic associations, patterns of movement, chance,
mathematics, whim, and imagination."
*Michael Lally - The Washington Post*
"The richness of life and time as they happen to us in tiny
explosions all the time are grasped and held up for us to view in
this magnificent work of prose and poetry that teaches us at the
end why 'no one knows why / Nothing happens.'""
*John Ashbery*
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