Studying Hunger Journals

Bernadette Mayer

In 1972 Bernadette Mayer began this project as an aid to psychological counseling, writing in parallel journals so that, as she wrote in one (in bed, on subways, at parties, etc.), her psychiatrist read the other. Using coloured pens to "color-code emotions," she recorded dreams, events, memories, and reflections in a language at once free-ranging and precise – a work that creates its own poetics. She sought "a workable code, or shorthand, for the transcription of every event, every motion, every transition" of her own mind and to "perform this process of translation" on herself in the interest of evolving an innovative, inquiring language. Studying Hunger Journals registers this intention within a body of poetry John Ashbery has called "magnificent."