Bernadette Mayer will give you ideas
On the late American poet’s irrepressible confident weirdness
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Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022)
Don’t you hate it when a writer describes something as “famous” and you’ve . . . never heard of the thing they’re talking about? This happens to me more often than I’d like to admit, most recently while reading a New Yorker piece on the American poet Bernadette Mayer, who died last November at age 77. The piece, by Daniel Wenger, mentions Mayer’s lectures at the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, “in which she would combine Dadaism and Curious George and issue her famous writing prompts to students.”
Oops, never heard of ‘em. But I clicked the link and I can see why the prompts are famous: They’re fucking delightful!
There are two categories of prompts here: a list of about three dozen journal ideas, most of them very brief (e.g., “food”; “finances”; “elaborations on weather”; “mail”) and a much longer list—more than four single-spaced typed pages—of “Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments,” which charmed me to no end. A few of my favorites:
Write what cannot be written; for example, compose an index.
Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial.
Find the poems you think are the worst poems ever written, either by your own self or other poets. Study them, then write a bad poem.
Choose a subject you would like to write “about.” Then attempt to write a piece that absolutely avoids any relationship to that subject. Get someone to grade you.
Set yourself the task of writing in a way you’ve never written before, no matter who you are.
Write a work that intersperses love with landlords.
I don’t normally find writing prompts terribly appealing, but these had a special quality for me. And it’s not so much the individual prompts as the generosity and capaciousness of the overall collection. For a long time, in my writing career, I thought that good ideas were this rare, precious commodity. More and more I think, no, that’s totally wrong—ideas are everywhere, and it’s not so much about finding a good idea for a new work as bringing the right attitude to that work.
Mayer had the right attitude. In a 2016 podcast episode, the writer Rachel Zucker said that, reading Mayer, she feels “emboldened by her irrepressibility, her confidence, her weirdness, her body-ness,” which pretty much nails it for me.
Not all of the prompts are as brief as the ones I quoted above. Here’s a longer one that I loved, and which I suspect could be adapted to any type of creative work: