Though she is best known today for her poetry, Bernadette Mayer’s 1972 exhibition of her durational writing-and-photography project Memory at 98 Greene Street in New York was highly influential: the young Kathy Acker, for one, began a feverish correspondence with her after her immersion in its images and voice. In a journal entry around the same time, Acker wrote that she admired “B. Mayer’s work list of daily events facts,” commenting that “I feel her work touches reality I distrust my own.” Acker, a post-punk appropriationist who devoured classical literature for the creation of her own twisted myths, may have longed for reality, but never for realism. Similarly, Mayer’s genre-busting work was a diary that never settled for the purely diaristic. For the month of July 1971, the 26-year-old poet kept a stream-of-consciousness journal and shot a roll of 35mm Kodachrome slide film every day. When the month was up, she projected the slides and supplemented her original observations with new details taken from the images—casual scenes of everyday life, from her lover in the driver’s seat of a car to nature walks and late-night chats with fellow artists. Memory, the completed work, comprised a grid of 1,116 photographs …