The Earth With A City In Her Hair

"i'll meet you at the zoo & we'll xerox" is a line that has long intrigued me from Bernadette Mayer's 2005 book, Scarlet Tanager. It's from "Stanzas In Meditation", a thirteen line poem that appropriates--or better said, activates--certain elements from Part I, Stanza I of Gertrude Stein's book-length poem of that name.

There seems to me something somehow very right about the image of xeroxing at the zoo; I like to visualize someone going into a special room at a zoo containing a public xerox machine and making all the copies s/he needs. The image is mysteriously pleasing; and likely popped into Mayer's mind because of the animal species name at the end of the word "xerox". One could leave it at that.

But I'd like to suggest that the image also points to the way that a zoo must reproduce as best as possible the physical environment each of its animals would be inhabiting in the Wild. That, I think, is the secret of why the image has always "worked" for me.

And when I look at the poem as a whole I think truly there is further support for my reading of the image. But we won't get into that now; to look at the poem properly I'd have to examine it in the light of the Stein poem, & I'll save that for later.

But I'll note that I have written the check to help Ms. Mayer and Mr. Good attain assurance that as the weather grows colder they will have (see the previous post) the domestic heat environment needed by human beings, and that very truthfully, it's in the mail.

Labels: Mayer