Bernadette Mayer’s Works and Days is a likable book—if you have the patience (and we would urge you to cultivate such patience) for writing that conveys a suspicion of syntax and a fondness for words that often stop conveying their meanings.  For us, the book reminds us some of the quiet joy we feel while reading Kenneth Koch or James Schuler—the joy experienced when the ramble of words suddenly becomes dead-on in ways that cannot be paraphrased.  Now,  we are happy to follow an “experimental” poet  down “A path where no man thought,” but we wonder ,if sometimes we are left wondering  whether what appears on the page is only inconsequential, as in “Yield to Opposing Traffic”:

Let’s start over begin again now who could

Ever meet me there then?  You think so

I doubt it’s yes it’s your eighth thought out

Of a humanity of utopian giggles humming

In the background of the empire city which is

Nowhere you would ever go without my relatives

And all their belongings on top of a truck

When the mountains turn blue the beer is cold

Yes it’s 8 it must be 8 it is number 8

A path where no man thought

Part of our response to such passages is to turn to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and try to figure out why Stein usually interests us more. Sometimes, as in the above, Mayer seems to “write to kill time.”  “Geology Night Sky” seems merely a jumble, a too-lengthy stretch that demands patience rather than rewarding it.  Sometimes lines have the fun of whimsy, as when poison-is gets called a “ménage-a-trois”; but sometimes they don’t, as with “Grackles are Donald Trump.”

Nonetheless, we were drawn into the fun of what the “Author’s Note” calls interspersed “seemingly random agglomerations of letters of a daily word game.”  These occur in pieces that are dated as diary entries, the first appearing at the end of the April 20 entry:

seora     mpost     preetx     starig     trecp     suymh

hmyus    tidfet     cucusa     slatb     cleri     wrinye

We made out “mushy” and “blast” immediately (supposing that the game entails rearranging scrambled letters into words) and were hooked by trying to puzzle out the other clusters.  Sometimes the agglomerations appear easy to “solve,” as in one of three offered in the May 30 entry:   “walfed      dewfal      flawed”—but the possible solution appearing among the scrambles makes us wonder if we understand the rules (of if the rules change from time to time).  Anyway, we were drawn into the often perplexing game.  We enjoyed, among other moments, being prompted to see the “sin” in “casino.”  IF you like letter/word games, you’ll enjoy much of your time with this book.

Jack remains most drawn to the ekphrastic poem Mayer has written for a show of Futurefamers at the Guggenheim—“Soule Sermon.”   We did not see the show but Jack nonetheless enjoys the questions raised about the differences between going around in bare feet and being shoeless because one has no shoes.  The punning is obvious but we enjoy the provocative playfulness:  “What does it mean for a soul to have no shoes?  / Does it mean my soul lacks support?”

The reason we bought the book is that Bill noticed that Mayer borrows Hesiod’s title—Works and Days—so he wanted to see how the book stood up as an example of the georgic mode.

Mayer’s poems, which offer themselves as reporting the experiences of a sometime gardener who lives in the suburbs, focus little on the work involved in growing food, but there the collection at least has overlap with georgic concerns.  The April 15 to June 21 chronology of the dated entries (which have other pieces interspersed among them) gives the book the feel of an almanac:  In the May 14 entry, Mayer writes, for example, “I’ve been told you can securely plant plants now.”  In the wording of that sentence, in the deft “securely” (with the sense that one wants a sure return), we can sense a georgic concern with how the growing of plants fits into the economic.  Fittingly, then, Mayer’s collection has a version of the georgic fall: “rich people / Duped everyone into thinking everything isn’t free.”   (Halfway into the collection, there is a short straightforward description of life “Prehistorically in Prehistoric times, when “People had memory of all things / Their tribe had ever done.”) The book opens with a list of the commodities offered the Mohicans for the area where the poet resides.  In a prose entry (April 25) she notes that late April is “the season of temptation”  because,  “Before it’s warm enough to grows plants here, the stores tell sell you plants and flowers to inspire you,” and because seed catalogues have gardeners wanting things they cannot yet touch.  An occasional character in the collection is GBF—“guy who bought the field” or, as he is also called, “gubofi,” (to give the abbreviation the vowels we expect in acronyms).  The poet questions GBF’s “right” to the field, worries about how he will develop it, and reports in the May 18 entry that he has “decided to let the lawn go back to field.”   The poem that most directly worries about the lives of farmers is a straightforward account of “The Rent Strike of 1848,” the strike being an attempt of farmers in five New York counties to try “to end the system where the patroons / (The 1%) rented their land to the 99%.”  The concern about the inappropriateness of property as a life-distorting idea:  The collection reiterates that “Property is robbery” and in the June 15 entry the poet returns to the notion that there is “a conspiracy to pay for something!  Or maybe, if you like earth, you can’t like it because capitalism will come and stop you.”

There are moments of closure to the georgic element in the book.  There’s the worry that “When people can’t mow because they mowed yesterday, or cut down trees, they chainsaw.”  There’s the worry that the rich just get richer: an elderly neighbor is “leaving her vast property to the Catholic Church.”  And then there is the slight georgic counter-current that another neighbor is “sharing his garden.”

We put the book down half pleased and half wondering—can someone who prefers the experimental tradition write a compelling book in the georgic tradition?   (There is an accompanying question–Should we assume that in the georgic mode—as opposed to the experimental mode—words will stay related to their usual meanings?)  Given what has happened to rural communities as suburbanization and industrial agriculture have replaced viable family farms, perhaps such questions are pointless.  The last page of Works and Days” is a “whirlwind” of words reminiscent of but different from Lewis Carroll.  But these words are set in a world where maple syrup seems less available than meth.

—Jack and Bill