Bernadette Mayer's writing experiments

 I’m just now finding the poet Bernadette Mayer’s list of journal ideas and writing experiments.

If someone professes to have a better way to patch drywall, I watch and listen. It’s the same with writing. Here’s a sample from Mayer’s list:

 

• Rewrite someone else’s writing. Maybe someone formidable.

• Explore possibilities of lists, puzzles, riddles, dictionaries, almanacs for language use.

• Typing vs. longhand experiments as recording/creating devices/modes.

• Write a work that intersperses love with landlords.

 

I think the first is most interesting. Scott Newstok wrote a dazzling book, How to Think like Shakespeare, that shows why you can learn to think like Shakespeare — or any other writer you admire — if you study his sentences and try to write in his style. That practice used to be common in education.

The second reminded me of Paul Auster’s list of his father’s traits. It’s just a list. It’s also a good portrait.

The third was interesting because I go back and forth between and typing and writing with a pen or pencil. I’ve got my own experiment going with pencils and index cards. The jury is out.

And the last is so zany I might just try it.

• Sources: The University of Pennsylvania’s Electronic Poetry Center has Bernadette Mayer’s List of Journal Ideas and Writing Experiments here:

https://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html

The University of Pennsylvania’s Electronic Poetry Center has Bernadette Mayer’s List of Journal Ideas and Writing Experiments here:

https://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html

If you look closely at the bottom, you’ll find a link to a list of experiments by Bernadette Mayer and the members of the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project Writing Workshop, 1971-1975, published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Vol. 1, No. 3, June 1978. It’s here:

http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/LANGUAGEn3/Language3.pdf

Scott Newstok, How to Think like Shakespeare; Princeton University Press, 2020. This is the eighth note that mentions his excellent book. If you’re looking for summary, see “Habits that shape the mind,” June 28, 2022.

Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude; London: Faber and Faber, 1988.