Bernadette Mayer's "Tomorrow"

Thoughts on joy, simply.

Tomorrow

for: max and alyssa
malyyssax worelish

tomorrow we'll see the lightbulb in schenectady,
go to gems farms in schodack, then on to howe caverns,
then to see the wayne thiebaud show at the clark
where we'll stop to notice the melting ice sculpture
then excellent spinach sap soup at the thai restaurant
in williamstown, a brief stop at the octagonal museum,
on to northampton to see the smith college art museum
& greenhouse where we'll see a green heron

it would be nice to be able to walk today
so we could go to opus 40 in saugerties
followed by a dinner of oysters & mussels at the bear
then on to check out the sheep at the sheepherding inn
where we're able to buy riccotta cheese
which means twice-baked, with which we're able
to make a pizza with fresh figs gotten from the berry farm
                           war what is it good for?
                           absolutely nothing


from Scarlet Tanager (New Directions, 1995)

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I think this is one of my favorite poems ever written, which I don’t say lightly, even if my favorite poems sometimes offer a lightness.

I love Bernadette Mayer. I have written about her work before, in a short essay where I mentioned today’s poem, which is called “Tomorrow.” Mayer’s poetry is of the world. It is enamored with daily life. It can be chaotic. It can be earthy. It is full of love and criticism. It tells it like it is and tells it like it could be. It is, without question, some good shit. And she wrote, without question, a single line that encapsulates, perhaps better than nearly anything, what it often — if not always — feels like to be alive:

If I suffered what else could I do

And look, I understand if today’s poem, which, yes, is called “Tomorrow,” might seem — at first read — a little unserious, a poem that feels simply like an uncapitalized list of things to do, but it is a poem that, as I have spent more and more time with it, expands my conception of what a poem can do, and what a life is for.

I think that, when I first read this poem years and years ago, I thought of it as a poem about consumption that then turned into a poem that protested war. It seemed, as I just mentioned, almost unserious for nearly all of its entirety, with a push — just at the end — into something serious. But I think — no, know — that I was wrong. At the time, when I first read this poem, I think I wanted poems to be dressed up in meaning; I wanted them peppered and dotted with the cues of meaning, the words of meaning, the rhythms of meaning. Now I know that what I want out of a poem doesn’t really matter, and shouldn’t. I know a poem can be many things. And I know a poem can enact its meaning in many ways. A poem can — and should — refuse my expectations of it. And I — reading poems, reading anything, talking with people, thinking of people, interacting with the world — should be more open to the possibility of being surprised, confounded, awestruck by meaning.

I think that’s the thing about meaning. It should always come to us a little bit slant, and, in so doing, open our periphery to new ideas of beauty, love, possibility, whatever the hell else. It’s like these lines about happiness from Raymond Carver:

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

And so, this poem today, this one that’s called “Tomorrow.” I love it dearly now. Here’s one reason I love it that I didn’t notice the first time I read it. Pay attention to the verbs. Here they are, in order:

see
go
see
stop
notice
see
see
be
walk
go
check out
buy
make

Only one of these verbs — and there are 13 — has to do explicitly with consumption. That verb is buy. The rest of the verbs — see, go, stop, notice, for example — are verbs of movement and attention. They are verbs of pausing and looking. When I first read this poem, I didn’t notice that. But now, I do. I see how Mayer is describing — for so many lines — not necessarily these acts of consumption, but rather these acts of attention. Even the one verb that is concerned with production — make — is offered in reference to something made, in good company, to be eaten among that good company. In other words, tomorrow, in Mayer’s poem, is a day filled with looking, and slowness, and care.

Consider these verbs of today’s poem alongside another of Mayer’s poems, “Failures in Infinitives,” which begins:

why am i doing this? Failure
to keep my work in order so as
to be able to find things
to paint the house
to earn enough money to live on
to reorganize the house so as
to be able to paint the house &
to be able to find things and
earn enough money so as
to be able to put books together
to publish works and books
to have time

It continues in this way, a litany of infinitives, of failed infinitives — which is to say, failed verbs, failed futures, failed ways of being. Here is a particularly devastating moment:

[failure] to not need money so as
to be able to write all the time
to not have to pay rent, con ed or telephone bills
to forget parents' and uncle's early deaths so as
to be free of expecting care

It’s a poem of deep, immense frustration. Frustration towards systems that limit people’s ability to engage with work that enlivens them. Frustration towards notions of selfhood that limit one’s personal ability to find themselves worthy of something like care. Frustration towards the mundane, sometimes overwhelming lists of things that seem to forever need doing. You can feel this frustration build up through the constant repetition, and you can sense how deeply Mayer feels this frustration, given how the only word that is capitalized in the entire poem is “Failure.”

And though I think Mayer would grant herself the grace that might rescue the feeling of this poem and restore it back to light, I also love her willingness to recognize that one can live with both an immense frustration and an immense capacity for grace. This is why I like to sit these poems next to one another. They exist in perpetual conversation, as we ourselves do. And that conversation is hard. It’s really hard.

The verbs in Mayer’s “Failures in Infinitives” are, like the verbs of today’s poem, not verbs entirely concerned with consumption or production. Some are (“to earn,” for example), but others are similar to the verbs in Mayer’s “Tomorrow” — verbs of artistic creation, verbs of ordinary longing: paint, teach, believe. This adds a great sorrow to both poems, because it shows how tied up even the simplest, least consumptive acts are with one’s ability to even afford the time for such acts. Or, too, the cost of them. Underneath the joy of Mayer’s “Tomorrow,” then, is the real, possible sorrow of the fact that such a tomorrow — simple, ordinary, filled with simple, ordinary joys — may never come.

This was one of Mayer’s most adamant critiques as a poet. It underscores so much of her work — her belief in the inherent value of art, of good company, of the real joy of shared politics and shared lives, and her belief that such things existed, nearly always, on the chopping block as a result of capitalism, empire, and more. In her poem, “Poem for the Benefit of Me,” she writes:

Thank you, all of you,
For helping in raising
Money in the USA where
I grew up, became one
Of the poets but can't
Earn a living

When I hold Mayer’s concern in my heart as I read today’s poem, the poem itself begins to radiate a real joy — the joy that is inherently political, because it is the joy of trying to freely live one’s life. Yes, there is still that possible sorrow of tomorrow never coming, but when you hold Mayer’s understanding and awareness of precarity close, then you can sense the unbelievable joy at the prospect of such seemingly-little, but really wonderful acts of attention:

we'll stop to notice the melting ice sculpture

we'll see a green heron

it would be nice to be able to walk today

to check out the sheep at the sheepherding inn

These are acts of such precious joy, acts that cost nearly nothing monetarily. And so, when the end of this poem comes, when it surprises the ordinary generosity of the poem’s dailiness and simple wanting with the violence of war, it serves as a reminder of how wildly, insanely large the cost of such violence is. Indeed, a 2023 budget proposal for the Defense Discretionary Spending put that cost at $886 billion. The craft at work in today’s poem makes that clear, as well. Mayer offers fifteen lines to her desires for a joyful tomorrow, and yet the two, shortened lines at the end enact the very violence of war upon the poem. They come sharply, with such speed and intensity. And though Mayer protests the fact of war with this poem, she shows, at the same time, just how brutally it announces itself, and how quickly it can unravel the beauty of the everyday.

And so, I love this poem, especially today, because as empire rears its ugly head, and as the fact of capitalism makes even the very idea of slowness a kind of consumption, through subscription-based meditation apps or through the notion that one must slow down in order to be more productive, then this poem reminds me that the simple joy of attention, of shared comfort with friends, of seeing and walking and being among, is not something that exists as some kind of cause and effect equation of capitalism and production, is not something we should do so that we can restore ourselves in order to be better at working. No — such things are things that can make up a life. They can be the places we find meaning, and beauty, and companionship, and new understandings of possibility.

It’s like how, just today, walking through Soho in Manhattan, my wife and I escaped the busyness of streets lined with stores and darted up a staircase on a side street to see Walter De Maria’s Earth Room, one of our favorite places in the city. It’s nothing really. Well, it’s something. An entire floor of an old building covered in probably two feet of soil. That’s it. But the moment you reach that floor, the city disappears, and the bustle of what you once left becomes not even distant. It becomes so far gone. And it’s just you, and a damp silence, and the rectangles of light falling in more rectangles on the soil stretched out in front of you like a clearing among a forest of trees. Talking feels irrelevant. Breathing feels good. And just like that — something makes itself possible for you. Some new way of being. Some new way of looking. And when you leave — hard thing such leaving is — you carry that new way with you. And you have no words yet for how that new thing changes you. But it does. And you’ll find the words later. That’s the beauty of language. It meets meaning somewhere along the way, and you can get to feel it all again.

That cost nothing, that little moment. And it meant so much. And so yeah — something like war? Which costs money? And lives? What is that good for? Absolutely nothing.

And hey. One more thing, if you’ve read this far. For what it’s worth, I’d like to share a little personal joy, which is that a novel I wrote — while sitting, for the most part, in the chair I’m sitting in now — is going to be published by the good people at Great Place Books (thank you, Emily Adrian and Alex Higley).

It’s called Pilgrims, and I started writing it not long after I started writing this newsletter over four years ago. And it went through a bunch of drafts, and a lot of uncertainty, and some giving up, and some being reminded, through friends, of what was worthwhile in it. And it’s about a lot of things, but namely it’s about my obsessions (which is, I think, maybe one definition of what a novel is — a catalog of obsessions rendered into narrative): wonder, mystery, forgiveness, grace, running, and more. And really, I’d like to just say thank you, especially if you’re reading this far, because that probably means you’re someone who has read this newsletter for a long time. Someone who has left a kind comment, sent me an email (that I probably took way too long to reply to). Such things have meant the world to me, because they have made me believe in writing more deeply into my obsessions — whether in this little newsletter, or on the nights, so many of them, that I spent tinkering with some wandering, wondering characters in a novel that felt a lot like me wandering and wondering, too.

As Mayer’s poem today reminds me, our production and our consumption mean far less than the time we spend with another. And that’s what a lot of this has felt like — time spent looking together at some of the same things. So, thank you for reading. It’s meant more to me than I have words to say.

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Some ongoing notes:

1. If you would like a little bit of joy, my students in my journalism class published their second issue of the year. You can read it here.

2. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

3. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.