Bernadette Mayer’s movements in the mind

My new article ”Movement in the present: Poetry as a mindfulness project in Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals” discusses how Mayer’s poetry project observes movements in the mind, all the emotional and affective reactions that cross her mind.

Mayer (b. 1945) is a US poet, known for works that cross genre boundaries and use language innovatively. The book project began in 1972 when she was undergoing psychoanalysis and started writing: “David, the psychiatrist, gave me two journals to write in, so that he could always keep one to read” (p. 1). It was, however, always also a literary project, and a part of it was published in 1975 as Studying Hunger (available for free as a facsimile & reading copy from Eclipse). In its entirety, the journals were published in 2011. One of the premises of the book is “the transcription of every event, every motion, every transition of […] her own mind” (p. 2).

While Mayer’s first context for her writing was psychoanalysis, I read Studying Hunger Journals as a project that centers in on mindfulness as a cue for reading and as a way of observing the self as a process created in the interstices of the movements of the mind. Understood as neutral observation (see pp. 174-175), mindfulness as a cue for reading encourages observing instead of interpreting.

I use Reuven Tsur’s work on cognitive poetics to discuss how poetry can work to “disrupt the ordinary consciousness” (p. 25), accentuating emotions and affect and the way they operate between the conscious and unconscious mind. Mayer’s writing focuses on the space between the conscious and unconscious, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the affective and the cognitive.

What, then, of the hunger that appears in the book’s title? It is, I would say, the overarching affect of Studying Hunger Journals, one that works in the unconscious as an urgent need to consume experiences, emotions, tastes and other sensations and cultivates a sense of incompleteness (see pp. 183-185 in the article).

The article appears in an edited collection called Movement and Change in Literature, Language, and Society, edited by Joel Kuortti and Sirkku Ruokkeinen. The book is multidisciplinary as it includes chapters on literature, linguistics, cultural studies and translation studies, all of which comment on movement, change, place and time in various ways. See the contents of the book here.

In keeping with the spirit of the book, I also touch on how to periodize Mayer, who has been associated with many different groups of writers over the years, like the New York School of poetry, Language Writing, and conceptual poetry. Studying Hunger Journals further accentuates the sense that Mayer is best read on her own terms, as a poet interested in exploring self-expression within an experimental project.

The article is a part of my research project Difficult Relations: Reading for Emotion in Recent American Experimental Poetry, where I am interested in how poetry mobilizes affects and what kinds of positions recent poetry offers for its readers.

References

Mayer, Bernadette. 2011. Studying Hunger Journals. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press of Barrytown.

Siltanen, Elina. 2020. ”Movement in the present: Poetry as a mindfulness project in Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals”. In Movement and Change in Literature, Language, and Society, edited by Joel Kuortti and Sirkku Ruokkeinen, pp. 171-189. Baden-Baden: Academia.

Tsur, Reuven. 2008. Towards a Theory of Cognitive Poetics. 2^nd revised edition. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.