Lyric Shame by Gillian White

Author:Gillian White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Mayer takes pains here to contrast writing and saying with visually emphasized phrases on right-justified lines: “I saw clearly,” “I write,” and “Can I say what I saw.” A sharp enjambment in lines 12–13 juxtaposes “I write” and “People say.” Our awareness of that juxtaposition emphasizes “tell” in the next line. In foregrounding (and making strange) the common identification of writing with speaking (even as she asks permission to “say”), Mayer puts us in the position to recognize our own investments (or divestments) in her speech. This relates to the pleasurable trouble of thinking about Midwinter Day in its relationship—temporally and as a representative object—to the “day” it claims to represent: for if, as is stated in the back-cover copy, the book was “written on December 22, 1978,” it can seem a real-time account of that day and, in this sense, to function with the impromptu and immediate qualities traditionally associated with lyric speech. Readers stumble over how to conceive of the work’s composition, a confusion that Mayer has courted: in a 1989 Naropa University lecture on the book, she claims, “Nobody ever believes me when I tell them it was written in one day, but it almost was.”67 But when asked by Rower, “Did you actually write all of Midwinter Day in one day? Is this a trade secret?” Mayer explains that she took notes on her dreams in the morning and adds, “There were many other things I wrote in the course of the day. Like I noted down which books I was reading to the children and later I made synopses of them so I could include them in the poem. All those things were easy to do later and impossible to do in the course of … I mean I never intended to just spend the day writing, though that would be interesting to try.”68

The question as to whether the book was written in one day concerns what we imagine “writing” to be, involving fantasies about a realm of pure expressiveness that are contradicted by the obvious craft in the poems’ deft repetitions and shapings. Indeed, so unlikely is it that the work was accomplished as an only lightly corrected draft of real-time writing composed over sixteen hours of a day spent caring for two small children (what Rower’s question supposes), we may wonder what Mayer has come to represent for those who admire her later work. There is obviously an important difference between, on the one hand, the idea of the “time allotted to the work,” as Hejinian describes it—“time [as it] predetermines the form of … Midwinter Day”—and the time allotted to the making of the work: to confuse the two is to confuse the author’s lived life with the work itself, to imagine Midwinter Day as Wordsworthian “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” feeling speech into print.69

Mayer’s stated aim to make a document of lived experience clearly crosses with fantasies about spontaneous expression with which she had been experimenting since Memory and Moving: “Let

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