by Noah Hale

“This is . . .  really the only real book of poetry I’ve published,” said Bernadette Mayer in a 1989 interview at Naropa about her monumental The Golden Book of Words (1978). She was mostly referring to the general structure of the book: “[Y]ou can see my involvement with questions like, you know, titles and questions like this. . .” but it’s easy to believe there’s a hint of well-earned pride implied by this remark.¹ It’s perhaps stunning to hear the multitalented and prolific Mayer single out the book in its significance as “real” when all of her other works feel equally significant. Yet it remains to be said that The Golden Book of Words has become recognized as a landmark in contemporary poetry and a turning point for Mayer’s career, structural proof of her formal capabilities which anticipated her later innovative avant-garde attitudes. Perhaps this singling-out is Mayer’s sly acknowledgement of her own achievement. With a new edition just out through New Directions (May 27, 2025), the book will shed some new light on the singular personality that came about from Mayer’s early work while allowing a new generation of readers to experience that for the first time.
Arranged in chronological order, reading through these poems gives the reader a rare feeling that Mayer is sharing these poems with you as though she had just written them. There’s an excitement between these poems that the act of rearrangement would only interrupt, as each one informs the other. While the new issue retains the chronology of the original, it’s worth noting that it adds page numbers that weren’t included in the original. A lack of page numbers in the original publication makes its reading feel like a more integrated practice removed from the norm, as if Mayer—even despite calling this her first “real” book, however serious she might have been—wanted to further eschew formality in favor of originality by omitting pagination. This creates the extraordinary effect of consciously or not, creating placeholders in the memory for and around where a poem was. While the inclusion of page numbers subtracts some of that in-the-moment-memory-foam-ish magic, it doesn’t defeat the integrity of the book. These poems act as their own characters in a way, and reading through the book by itself, as its own container apart from a collected-selected split (The Bernadette Mayer Reader; Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words), further emphasizes the true originality of what Mayer was in the process of doing. One can flip to any page to see one of the poems as a relational object within its surrounding poems, while also recognizing that this placement was intentional—as opposed to accidental, or if sometimes accidental then it’s easy to see the relationship as the result of harnessing the same energy behind those relations. The result is that every poem has a purpose in this book; there’s not a single bastard brainchild.
          The first poem is a Shakespearean love poem dedicated to Lewis Warsh which also serves as a self-aware prelude; the next poem, a mock-athletic discourse on the “End of Human Reign on Bashan Hill,” is followed by the similar ski-slope geography of “The Olympics;” reading ahead, a wider view of her New England landscape (with its “hedonistic wizardry”) is omnipresent in all the poems between Mayer’s well known “Lookin Like Areas of Kansas” and “Essay.” Reading through these poems is to share a real life in-the-moment experience with Mayer, however distorted its written afterimage might appear on the page. We’re not only reading her worldview but stepping inside it, too, and it doesn’t take long for us to start to see our own worlds taking shape alongside—or inside—the gorgeous assembly at work. 
Geography aside: this book also includes a few different mentions of Mayer’s personal literary pantheon. In this aspect there are two kinds of figures who are graced enough to appear, 1) her contemporaries, and 2) her classics. In the former camp are stand-out names such as poets Tom Raworth and John Ashbery and Ezra Pound (and plenty more in “Simplicities Are Glittering”) as well as some surprise appearances from television personality Barbara Walters and former Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk. In the latter, some of Massachusetts’ literary darlings (Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson) as well as traditionally canonical poets (especially Milton, but also “Catholic Catullus,” Dante, and Virgil, to name a few) rub shoulders in between the choreographed hubbub of Mayer’s loud imagination. This split-personality of Mayer’s converges excellently between “Essay” and “Hell At Last, Yawning, Received Them Whole.” Following her characteristic listing-off (I guess it’s too late to live on the farm / I guess it’s too late to move to a farm. . .”) written in plain American, there’s the pointed prosody of the Western classical tradition with Milton in command (from the first lines: “John Milton’s sentiments don’t hasten spring / More worsen winter’s heaviness still in April. . .”). This latter poem ends with what could be considered Mayer’s understanding of the history of poetry: “. . . A pocket of poets everlastingly disarmed / The garbage government of fierce corrupted language / All men and women were free to sleep and dream a reverie.” She invokes her poet-predecessors to frame her work as uninhibited expression which she—and we all do—owes to the reconstitutive power that poets possess. 
It’s a wonderful cast of characters on Mayer’s idiomatic stage. Yet despite the prominence of all of these figures, Mayer unabashedly places herself among them all as one of their equals. She writes herself—and all her literary idols—into a bold kind of contemporaneity. In an age which is happy to accept an ignorance of literary precedent if it means gaining quicker access to the market of novelty, Mayer’s work courageously emanates an optimistic glow in the cobwebby corners of originality. It still offers a lasting challenge for new poets to respond to as, despite it having been nearly 50 years since its original publication, the voice in these poems is astonishingly familiar in our present. How will a new generation of poets recapture the brilliance that makes reading this book so special to so many people? 
Mayer only makes it look easy. In fact, it’s anything but. The poems in The Golden Book of Words are easy to read because they were difficult to write. There’s an extremely unique calculus happening in these poems that is able to reconcile the relatively straightforward daily observations with Mayer’s own planetary mind as it wanders the cosmos of her imagination. It is only through Mayer’s careful coordination that these poems come together so seamlessly while still retaining the elements of difficulty that reward the reader with unusual insight. She then becomes both a sort of metaphysician of the mind and skilled masseuse of the imagination. In a lot of ways, the last poem in this collection, “Spring House,” summarizes these same qualities in Mayer’s own words. Says Mayer: “What text will tell me how to so benefit my own ideas?” Say we: “My waiting for love’s order to know me sensibly, for incomprehensible prose to become poetry.” And it’s this waiting—this ongoing love affair recent poetry has had with Mayer—which is always consummated again and again by Mayer’s work. We wait alongside her, even in the act of reading. And in reading, we can feel the impulses which guided Mayer as she wrote these answers down. This new edition of The Golden Book of Words throws a long-awaited reunion party for the work of one of contemporary poetry’s most accomplished imaginations. The Crazy Horse is open again—let’s bring back the Rheingold beer.

Notes

¹ Transcript from the Bernadette Mayer workshop at Naropa, July 17, 1989: Bernadette Mayer - 1 - The Allen Ginsberg Project

New Direction’s May 2025 re-issue of The Golden Book of Words is now available.