Ceremony Latin (1964)

Click on thumbnails/images to view larger images.

Published in 1975 as Bernadette Mayer’s third book of poems, this stapled volume presents Mayer’s earliest work, written in 1964. In lecture for the Jack Kerouc School of Disembodied Poetics, Mayer describes the book as a journal she kept at the age of seventeen, which she decided to print as a book “because the keeping of this journal was what had inspired me to really want to become a poet, so I thought it might be beautiful and useful to other people.”

Bernadette Mayer. Ceremony Latin (1964). New York: Angel Hair, 1975.