Tag: Bernadette Mayer

Ever the Same: Bernadette Mayer’s ‘The Golden Book of Words’

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Posted on by editor

Originally published in 1978, the late Bernadette Mayer’s poetry collection The Golden Book of Words is available again from New Directions, reissued with the gorgeous original cover design by Joe Brainard. The collection includes both better-known early poems like “Essay” (“I guess it’s too late to live on the farm / I guess it’s too late to move to a farm / I guess it’s too late to begin farming”) and a variety of other, equally vibrant and formally inventive poems such as “Simplicities are Glittering” and “What Babies Really Do.” Mayer, associated with the Language Poets and the New […]

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“The Long Views Are Terrific”: Some Words for Bill Berkson

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Posted on by me

I was sad when I heard Bill Berkson died in June. I knew he’d been ill but didn’t know the details. But he always seemed to be the picture of a gentleman poet—by that, I don’t mean the stuffy, overly courtly, bow-tie beclad figure of an academic measuring his words in coffee spoons, of course. Or even exuding the quieter scent of class, though Bill clearly knew his way around the world of high society: His mother, Eleanor Lambert, was regarded as the doyenne of fashion publicity, and his father, Seymour Berkson, had been a high-ranking Hearst executive and for […]

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