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 colored 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.