“I Have All the Time in the World”: Bernadette Mayer’s Being in Time

Abstract

This essay argues that several of Bernadette Mayer’s major works foreground and develop experiences of subjective time as moments of resistance to the standardizing force of objective clock and calendric time that governs daily material existence. Basing my argument on a framework for subjective time developed in the field of linguistics, I show how Mayer’s play with duration, temporal recursiveness, and moments of stopped time in works including Memory, Midwinter Day, Works and Days, and Milkweed Smithereens function as subversions of the normative material every day, and I argue that throughout her work Mayer is preoccupied with not merely representing time, its content, and its passage, but rather with gaining mastery over objective time and subverting its authority altogether. This essay joins the scant research on time and temporality in Mayer’s work and offers an invitation to further study of subjective time as a mode of resistance in contemporary poetry.

A central if sometimes overlooked member of the experimental writers’ community, poet Bernadette Mayer, passed away in 2022, leaving behind a substantial body of linguistically experimental, formally hybrid work that—for all its structural complexities and innovations—often appears to be most deeply rooted in her daily experience as a woman, wife, and mother. From Memory (first exhibited in 1972), Mayer’s groundbreaking hybrid work made up of photographs and accompanying text charting the month of July in 1971, to Midwinter Day (1982), her epic poem mixing prose and lyric poetry that charts a 24-h period in December 1978, to The Desires of Mothers to Please Others In Letters (1994), a collection of unsent letters/prose poems written during the nine months of her pregnancy with her third child, a good deal of Mayer’s major work locates lived experience and its messy content as the site and occasion of her experiments with language and mixings of forms (Mayer 2020, 1982, 1994). And whereas Mayer’s work crosses borders not only of genre but also—at least in public perception—of various writing communities, including the New York School and the language and conceptual art communities (Biederman 2017; Kane 2003; Bernstein 1984; Anderson 2020), much of the scholarship around her poetry has attended to the matter of dailiness, examining the ways Mayer brings the quotidian into her writing as a political and feminist act. In Ann Vickery’s groundbreaking feminist study, Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing, Vickery—quoting Mayer herself—points to Mayer’s “seemingly transparent style” created “to focus on ‘unspeakable’ areas of experience—sexuality, motherhood, and desire” (Vickery 2000, p. 159). In Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture, Andrew Epstein argues for Mayer’s creation of “poetics of the maternal everyday”, the aesthetic of Midwinter Day that foregrounds the influence of gender on the experience of the daily and that explores the politics of motherhood (Epstein 2016, p. 156–96). And in “The Day and the Life: Gender and the Quotidian in Long Poems by Bernadette Mayer and Lyn Hejinian”, Bronwen Tate argues for the ways Mayer’s Midwinter Day “test[s] [the long poem’s] capacity for radical inclusiveness and trac[es] metonymic connections between daily routines and larger social issues” (Tate 2016, p. 46). These scholars have made invaluable inroads into Mayer’s poetry, guiding readers’ interpretations of the, at times, overwhelming excesses of quotidian life that Mayer offers up in playful, improvisatory language and mixings of literary forms, from the intimacy of child-rearing to the specific details of her immediate environment to her responses to social issues to her experience of writing, and much more than even this.

While on the one hand it might appear obvious that poetry replete with the experience of dailiness would place all the stuff of life into discrete sections of time, and therefore natural that any critical reading of the work would attend to the poet’s many accounts of time passing, Mayer’s conception of time as an ordering principle and the poet’s own relationship with it have gone largely unexamined. It is true that Mayer’s debt to Gertrude Stein’s continuous present has been noted by critics including Maggie Nelson, but the unspoken assumption in most of the criticism has been that Mayer conceives time as flowing ever forward in a linear progression. Indeed, in studies of Mayer’s three major works, most scholars and critics have taken the forward trajectory of time as given, attending to what appears along the way and what Mayer’s language does with all that dailiness1. Paradoxically—given its heightened presence as a delimiter of the work—time itself as a phenomenological concept and narrative device is less often attended to, a state of affairs much in need of correction.

In fact, as I argue here, Mayer’s body of work can productively be read as a creative study in time, the framework that she foregrounds in most of her work as a container for her poems. For in addition to Memory, Midwinter Day, and The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, there is Mayer’s Studying Hunger (1975), a diaristic prose work charting one month of writing alongside her therapy, and the lyric/prose Works and Days (2016) within which she nests Spring Journal, March 20–June 21 (Mayer 1975, 2016). In all the work mentioned above, spans of time are explicitly marked, in one sense functioning deceptively as the apparent limits of the poetry and prose contained within even as Mayer pushes against this and other boundaries in language that exceeds normative conventions and strictures. Briefly nodding to Mayer’s use of time, Maggie Nelson in Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions recognizes Midwinter Day as “a time-based experiment” and The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters as “obsessed” with “the economy of time measurement, especially the time it takes to write and the time it takes to gestate” (Nelson 2007, p. 99–129). Referring to Midwinter Day in particular, Nelson sums up Mayer’s approach to time thus: “…the great paradox of time-based experiments is that their temporal constraints often produce the dizzying and liberating sensation of unconstrained time” (Nelson 2007, p. 127). Yet Nelson does not analyze the specific ways that Mayer plays with and against time, writing poetry that at times flows along with it in a Bergsonian durée and at other times moves in a Steinian continuous present. At still other times, Mayer reorders time entirely, drawing attention to chronology as a collection of movable reference points, sites of meaning and being that appear in relation to—as opposed to preceding or following—other such sites. This reordering of moments and days points to Mayer’s experience of time as more than an organizing device; indeed, discrete disordered moments suggest both recognition of or belief in a state of being outside of our normative understanding time—or a state of pure being in the Heideggerian sense—as well as growing anxiety over life in the mainstream, administered world of life in the Anthropocene era.

And so herein, I analyze several of Mayer’s works for the ways she constructs, bends, and thwarts time, staging interventions into objective or clock time through representations of various modes of subjective time. In attending to Mayer’s representations of these phenomena, I argue that throughout her work, Mayer is preoccupied with not merely representing time, its content, and its passage, but rather with gaining mastery over objective time, subverting its authority altogether through play with time stoppage and reversal, the reordering of geological time, and meditations on time as a human construct. As foundation for my argument and with the goal of showing how we can read a number of Mayer’s works from early and late in her career as cross-genre linguistic intercessions into objective time as a controlling idea, I begin by laying out linguist Anna Piata’s brief history of the phenomenology of subjective time and introducing the tri-partite structure of subjective time postulated by Sven Thönes and Kurt Stocker and further elaborated upon by Piata (see Piata 2023, p. 30–59; Thönes and Stocker 2019, p. 114–22). Following this overview of subjective vs. objective time, I briefly summarize Mayer’s constructions of and interventions into time in several of her early works, including Memory and Midwinter Day, before moving to more detailed close readings of time rupture in her late works, Works and Days and Milkweed Smithereens, collections that reflect a weightier emotional attachment to subjective time as Mayer’s “time on earth” draws to a close. Throughout this essay, it is my contention that in addition to or as part of her countless forays into linguistic experimentation and the frequent merging of discrete genres, Mayer is deeply concerned with separating organic lived life from the standardizing march of clock or calendric time and with constructing a life and poetics freed from the received order of minutes, hours, and days.

In “An exploration into construals of subjective time in poetry,” Anna Piata shows how “[o]ur experience of time often suggests a deviation from the uniform measurement of time by the clock and even a breach of the social norms that regulate temporality”; already there is an echo in this argument of Mayer’s own deviations from and breaches of normative language, which, I argue here, work in tandem with her breaches of time itself (Piata 2023, pp. 31). Piata next traces a history of the phenomenology of subjective time—that is, time as it is experienced—that begins with Kant, for whom “time is no longer conceived as an external, objective reality,” moves to Husserl, for whom ‘’’internal time’ … is inextricably associated with human consciousness,” proceeds to Merleau-Ponty’s argument that “the problem of time is intertwined with embodied subjectivity; it is a temporal flux of bodily consciousness”, and concludes with Heidegger, who “defines time as ‘the horizon of every understanding and interpretation of being’”2. For all these theorists, subjective time is an experiential and even affective phenomenon to be distinguished from objective clock or calendric time. Following this history of the idea of subjective time, citing Thönes and Stocker, Piata divides the subjective experience of time into three categories, the last two of which will inform my discussion of Mayer’s work: temporal processing (a largely unconscious organizing of events); the passage of time, which includes variation in time perception; and duration, or the experience of how much time has passed during an interval (Piata 2023, p. 35). In the case of these last two temporal experiences, consciousness and memory play an integral role. Piata goes on to trace evidence of these modes of subjective time in the work of poets as diverse as T.S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, and John Keats (among others), providing something of a foundation for my own analysis of Bernadette Mayer’s poetry, yet departing from Piata’s line of inquiry, I will show how in Mayer’s own poetics of time these subjective modes are not only distinct from and counterposed to objective or clock time, but are also points of resistance to the standardizing force of the latter. Indeed, we could say that Mayer’s work is built upon the very idea of subjective time as a potentially revolutionary force opposing the materialist order of clock time.

Whereas Mayer’s repeated reference to time has been integral to her poetics throughout her writing life, in what follows I am going to attend primarily to the ways her ordering of time changes as her life progresses and takes on new significance in her last two books, Works and Days and Milkweed Smithereens, the latter published in 2022, the year of her death (Mayer 2022). I want to begin, however, with a brief look at her Memory and then Midwinter Day in the interest of tracing a progression in Mayer’s work from an earlier privileging of clock time juxtaposed against the continuous or recursive present to a growing interest in time as an indication of global instability and a corresponding anxiety about being in time. It is in this latter time-sense that, as I will show, Mayer turns from chronicling the unfolding experiences of the local and personal I to the creation of a subject thoroughly mediated by standard time as well as geological time, a subject to witness and record global crisis in the Anthropocene.

As noted, Memory is a hybrid comprising photographs and narrative tracing of the month of July 19713. For this monumental project, which takes approximately six hours to fully experience in a gallery setting, Mayer shot one roll of film per day for the 31 days of July and paired each day’s worth of photos with a corresponding poetic/prose narrative that reads like a marriage of Frank O’Hara’s chatty I do this, I do that poems with a more conceptual rethinking of narrative that we see in Mayer’s contemporaries in feminist experimental poetry, including Alice Notley, Norma Cole, and Joanne Kyger, all given in a meditative pregnant time-sense. For example, touching on one photo of Lewis Warsh against a dark background, Mayer writes,

• he leans against the machine a fortune in tom’s shirt he isnt talking
• he leans against the machine a fortune in t’s shirt
• ……
• but now he leans against the machine, reels, & while it’s on i’ve turned
• we are now in an image sound his hair was4

In book form, the hybrid or compound poetic/photographic piece can be understood as related to a word portrait in the tradition of Gertrude Stein, one that chronicles continuous states of being that cannot be fully rendered in a still image. And as in Stein’s word portraits, Mayer herself plays a role, one that Aaron Lercher aptly names that of an “observing instrument.” (Lercher 2023, not paginated). Viewed live in a gallery, the effect must be immersive as the viewer experiences 31 days in the space of six hours, lingering at some moments longer than at others, getting lost in recursive narrative as the day proceeds uniformly according to the clock in the external world. That is, the viewer must stop and dwell with the photo as the language composes the portrait, and yet whereas time should be moving forward in the calendar, it stands still or reverses in the listener’s/viewer’s experience. Thinking back to Piata’s breakdown of subjective time, the duration of the experience would be felt unevenly as time passes at different rates, Mayer having created for the viewer/listener a subversion of clock time and a compression of calendric time. A bit later on the same day (1 July), Mayer names the time in the mode of Frank O’Hara: “12:10 we were up early we did the light on me was morning light” before jumping ahead to “he was here tonight you can tell the time” and then, a page later, restating the “12:10 we were up early…” line (Mayer 2020, p. 13–14). That is, a single moment in time continues to recur even as the trajectory of the book moves in sequential order through the month. The overall effect is that of the subjective experience of time rupturing the larger, controlling order that is the forward progression of the month with its limited number of days; taken as a whole, Memory’s idiosyncratic movement entirely undermines any linearity or finitude. As Stephanie Anderson, quoting Achille Mbembe, suggests, “[w]hile Memory’s photographs, in their chronological order and calendric grid, allude to structural precision and completion, the audio script’s disjunction belies the promise of archival ‘totality and continuity’” (Anderson 2020, p. 260; See Mbembe 2002, p. 19–26). Perhaps winking at the multiple ways time relates to or structures Memory, Mayer writes in her introduction to the 2020 Siglio Press edition, “It encompasses the month of July 1971. I think it’s a short space of time, but it takes up a lot of room, depending on how you store it” (Mayer 2020, p. 7), “store” being apt for the mental storage of the audience who has traveled through a month in the space of six hours as well as for the physical storage of the work in the gallery.

Appearing a few years later, Mayer’s lyric/prose/epic Midwinter Day is unique in the way it proffers dreamtime as an alternative to clock time, even as the poet appears to be searching for and redefining time itself. Composed entirely over the course of one 24-h span of time, the poem is divided into six sections corresponding to the phases of a day, beginning with the dreams that precede awakening in the morning and progressing forward in clock time until the dreams that come on at night, the time in which Mayer (and Lewis Warsh, her then-husband) writes. From the beginning of the text, the movement or apparent forward progression of time is occasionally foregrounded as a system among other systems, one that is manipulable and inhabitable in spaces that are outside the weighty dailiness that otherwise suffuses the poetry. Moreover, these glimpses of spaces outside of clock time indicate spaces in which Mayer writes and imagines; that is, for all the fullness and dailiness of Midwinter Day, a book that seems charted in the customary clock time, Mayer’s search for and creation of a more ephemeral and subjective time/space to write is one of her preoccupations.

In Part One, Mayer asks of Warsh, the implied “you” of the moment, “Can I say what I saw/In sleep and dreams/And what dreams were before your returning arms” (Mayer 1982, p. 2), indicating that the poem will progress as a recitation of dreams while also moving recursively backward from the time of the embrace to the time of the dreaming. Yet Mayer quickly ties the experience of dreaming and the process of making “a story” to the structure and movement of time, writing

• Can I say that here
• Or should I wait till later wherever the question
• Of life’s chronology of satisfying the favored senses
• Might better gratify the falling course of the grave day… (Mayer 1982, p. 4)

“Later” here becomes a place (“wherever”) and the passage of time (“life’s chronology”) becomes the equivalent of pleasure, even as—in an innovative abstraction—time moves downward in “a falling course”. It is as though Mayer is redefining time, playing with some of the many things it might mean other than a primary standardizing principle of human existence. Shortly thereafter, in a dream wherein Mayer and Warsh move into a house with people whose identities morph into others’, Mayer writes “I am trying to remember where in time I am” (Mayer 1982, p. 5), blurring the line between herself in the dream and the writing self that records the action. Mayer’s disorientation flags a lacuna, a gap in the text where the mind of the creator becomes visible against the backdrop of the narration, and the trajectory of the text temporarily ceases to be a forward-moving chronology experienced as dreams and instead becomes a set of discrete moments which the creator can move among and inhabit. In other words, in a preview of her later works, Mayer has created a place out of time in which change is possible and unbounded by forward-moving action.

Moving forward in the poet’s career, Mayer’s Works and Days announces its preoccupation with time in its title. Taken from Hesiod’s work by the same name, the title summons associations with the 8th century BCE Greek poet, a contemporary of Homer who is widely regarded as the first written poet in Western tradition to present himself in his work as an individual persona (Powell 2017, p. 1). Mayer thus harkens back in time to the origins of the Western canon, placing herself in that tradition while also placing herself as an individual persona in Spring Journal: March 20–June 21, which forms the complete text of Works and Days. The first poem of the collection is a plunge through time on the conveyance of a list poem to the history of the colonists’ incursion into the land of Native peoples. Dated April 15, the poem begins, “Payment for some Mohican land:/300 guilders in sewan/8 blankets/25 ells of duffel…” (Mayer 2016, p. 5). Each line begins with a number as the material traded for land is itemized; devoid of any verbs, there would seem to be no action. And yet the experience of reading the list is the experience of travel to another time when this accumulation of goods was deemed of equal value to the land in Mayer’s environs. Time is collapsed and then is now; to inhabit the land is to be immediately connected to this manifest of goods with their old names and functions that would seem to have receded to the past. Conversely, moving forward from the past, what amounts to the theft of the land is ongoing in the present. Bodied forth in the poem, then, is the suffering and loss of the Native Americans who once occupied what is now the United States, and the trauma of the past becomes palpable in the present moment. This is the marked space and time that Mayer inhabits as her book begins: one foot in the present, one in the past, history emerging in the language.

The third and by far the longest poem of Works and Days, “Soule Sermon”, is within this first section marked April 15 yet exceeds or escapes that date with its many references to different eras in modern, ancient, and geological time and Mayer’s time-traveling, shapeshifting I5. The title of the poem situates us in the Middle Ages with the Middle English spelling of “soul” and from there jumps immediately into prehistory before a hop to classical Greece with “It could be that I was a fish or was once/I remember thinking Aristotle was an asshole…” (Mayer 2016, p. 7), the poem proceeding in a back and forth between two narratives—one geological, one modern and cultural—that overlap each other, with the occasional interruption of an immediate present, often for comic effect. The poem references the Permian, carboniferous, and Jurassic periods right before “Did you ever hear that politicians/& psychopaths use the same mental stuff” (Mayer 2016, p. 10), a juxtaposition that presents two alternative modes of being—one as a piece of organic matter in a long chain of evolution, the other as a socially embedded modern citizen fed on (and up for chatting about) corruption and criminal minds. Paratactic arrangement aside, both states of being can be contained in one, of course, though the omnipresence of noise in our contemporary age obviates awareness of one’s imbrication in any natural order. The poem is an elaborate foray into language play that concerns itself, however comically, with the question of a transhistorical soul, that entity attributed to each human being by the Catholic Church (in which Mayer was raised) and one which in Mayer’s poem has the ability to travel in time, coming to a stop in the bleak present with “Alec Baldwin looks a lot like Alec Baldwin” (Mayer 2016, p. 13). Here, time is out of order yet entirely contained in the present, a moment Mayer represents metonymically as the site of redundancy and senselessness.

This early poem’s moving about in time notwithstanding, the real movement in Works and Days is in the process of incipience, the slow emergence of language calibrated to days passing in the season of emergences. Following April 15, Mayer writes the entry for April 14, flagging the recursive move with a nod to Stein’s continuous present with “Let’s begin again”6, and shortly thereafter, the entry for 20 April includes words whose letters have been reordered to make a new kind of language, much like Susan Howe in her re-writing of the early American narrative, “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time” (Howe 1990). As the days in Works and Days progress forward, language and meaning emerge (or do not) in words that seem to grow and develop like plants, early words being “tidfet [fetid]” and “preext [pretext]’” along with the more difficult to decipher “cleri” and “hmyus” (Mayer 2016, p. 17). Such moments of relative opacity are interspersed with chatty lyric poems, one of which—“Leg of Lamb”—avers “Sometimes never we will never come to an end because/Starting over’s our addiction” (Mayer 2016, p. 21). The overall effect of the calendar time moving forward even as “starting over” and beginning again punctuate the work is one of an expanded continuous present in which the present is not in our modern sense of clock time, or “right now”, but is rather in a deep time of origins in which linguistic incipience is an indication of a cognitive incipience, or a coming to consciousness in language.

For Works and Days’ time-based hybrid makeup of lyric poetry, prose journal entry, and alternative language reveals a new understanding of time in Mayer’s work, one that will also inform her last book, the hybrid journal/lyric Milkweed Smithereens. Whereas earlier books could be said to be concerned with the subject as already formed in the world as she experiences and reorders the movement of modern time, Works and Days and Milkweed Smithereens can be linked to a Heideggerian sense of time, or the time of being in which the subject is first located in the world, before reason and the ordering of mechanized time take over. Indeed, Heidegger appears in Milkweed Smithereens when Mayer writes

• vladimir nabokov said:
•    i confess i do not believe in time
•    in BEING AND TIME, poor Heidegger
•    didn’t finish the time part in time
•    to publish it with the being part
•    so everything-now must be not-being
•    there is a pine needle stuck in the screen
•    the side nearest me must be the being side
•    the one farther away’s the time side
•    nabokov only said the first line
•    even when you have nothing to do
•    there’s not enough time in the day (Mayer 2022, p. 14)

Somewhat later than this moment of negation, Mayer injects Heidegger again in a minimizing “I found ‘being and time’ under the table. ancient ontology: we all have our moments under the table” (Mayer 2022, p. 36). Even as Mayer contradicts Heidegger and recapitulates the title of his masterwork as a frame for viewing a fragment of nature, Mayer’s invocation of Heidegger points to an alternative consciousness of time in which one’s essential being precedes one’s cognition of and formation by the administered world. Another way of saying this is that for Heidegger—and, I argue, for Mayer—there is a state of pure being out of which the socially situated subject emerges. It is this emergence into modernity and its accompanying system of time that Mayer traces in Works and Days and interrogates in Milkweed Smithereens.

Milkweed Smithereens, composed during the COVID-19 pandemic and as Mayer approached the end of her life, comprises a series of out-of-sequence journal entries—all presented in italics—juxtaposed against lyric poems; taken as a whole, the complete work is a symphony of Mayer’s adventures in time. The continuous present shows up in “Absence of Faces” when Mayer writes “no one can/not begin again”, the journal on the facing page stating “the future’s more in the past but what is this that’s happening now?” (Mayer 2022, p. 22–23). Yet there is more anxiety in this last collection, with Mayer referring to “this disastrous time, well this isn’t exactly a disaster, it’s I don’t know whatchamacallit, isn’t that a bklyn term?” (Mayer 2022, p. 28) and later urging “you’d better hurry up, the world might be over soon … ‘anthropocene’ might be the end of the world, literally” (Mayer 2022, p. 69). Referring outward at times to the pandemic, Mayer also refers back to her earlier work and its relationship to time, writing at one point, “time is a room, you could say time was anything; about MEMORY, stop time is a curtain blowing in the wind, i remember what’s in the pictures but not what’s in the words, the words could be any words, maybe i should’ve memorized memory” (Mayer 2022, p. 26). The effect is that of the poet repeatedly locating herself in discrete moments of time, many “now”s, as the calendar is out of order and the days double back on themselves. At each point, Mayer recedes into a moment of being that is outside the calendar time she charts in her disordered journal entries, ultimately searching for meaning in time even as she gestures to a world outside the construct altogether: “for instance why do people mix together time & space? a chipmunk wouldn’t” (Mayer 2022, p. 68).

For Mayer, the accepted sequence of narrative time—beginning, middle, end—is in fact a fungible pretext, a construct in need of revision if not destruction; at the same time, and as the poems in Milkweed Smithereens prove, the only “real” time for Mayer is the moment of writing. We see her search for a moment to alight in “From All Sides” when she writes “safest place to be is in the past” (Mayer 2022, p. 16), a sentiment echoed in an prosy excerpt from The Second World of Nature or Next Planet, where she muses “there is talk of time travel too …i wonder if there are a lot of people in loony bins who remember the future (?) today? in the past? in the future? i see a fly, i saw a fly, i will see a fly …” (Mayer 2022, p. 64). Here the stations of time—past, present, future—are mere verb tenses as Mayer hops from point to point, linking the ability to move about in time to the outsider status of the insane. That is, one can travel in time—“be safe in the past”, for example—but to do so is also to join society’s castoffs in the asylum, losing touch with those who conform to the standard order of time. Yet in “No More Reading”, a poem echoing the tone and style of Midwinter Day, Mayer reflects on her final “home” in time, the time of writing. First, there is “[t]oo much history to put into poetry/Too much time to age the prose/In oak casks till it withers the line” (Mayer 2022, p. 40), this referring to writing after it is written. Distinct from time passing, however, is the only time there is: “But the only time I’m letting myself be forgetting/This loving kiss of everything memory too/Is when I’m writing or we’re fighting/Or who I am not only then, my love, loves you” (Mayer 2022, p. 41). With this link between writing and love, Mayer returns to the centering of love in her writing that she elaborates on in Midwinter Day even as she destabilizes the time surrounding the love through a mixed syntax—“who I am not only then, my love, loves you[]” (Mayer 2022, p. 41). The only time Mayer allows herself to be is in the time of writing and loving, practices that she lifts from chronology and isolates in discrete moments that are out of time altogether.

Faint echoes of earlier work notwithstanding, Mayer’s late work interrogates and ultimately refuses the forward trajectory of clock and calendric time, foregrounding dates only to place them out of order, flirting with time travel, speculating on life in alternative times. Yet all the while, Mayer is subjectively inhabiting moments as moments, turning them over, looking at them, stopping the movement of time in the act of writing; moreover, Mayer disrupts the audience’s own experience of time. Whereas she began her writing life toying with time as it is given, Mayer concludes her oeuvre with radical disruption of time, reflecting perhaps a late-life desire to exist outside of the time that marches on. Taken in aggregate, then, her body of work can be read as hybrid poetry/narratives that successfully subvert time as a regulating force, a preoccupation she shares in common with contemporaries Alice Notley, Norma Cole, and Joanne Kyger. In fact, all these poets’ work invites a study such as this one. Finally, while it remains beyond the scope of this article to more closely examine specific instances of Mayer’s linguistic experimentation as moments of rupture in time (that is, interruptions in normative language as stoppages in time), this would also be an area for further inquiry.