Come celebrate the release of Bernadette Mayer’s STUDYING HUNGER JOURNALS (Station Hill Press). This will be a great event to get a feel for our Bernadette Mayer folio in Issue 14 (Summer 2011). Fiction editor Deborah Poe is one of the readers.
In part, the journals explore psyche and were undertaken, in cahoots with a psychiatrist via two running journals, so that while she kept writing in one he could read the other. She wrote in colored pens, intending to “color-code emotions”—to see if her synaesthetic ability to see letters as colors might act as a bridge to seeing emotions. She had had an idea: “…if a human, a writer, could come up with a workable code, or shorthand, for the transcription of every event, every motion, every transition of his or her own mind, & could perform this process of translation on himself, using the code… he or we or someone could come up with a great piece of language/information.” While an abridged edition appeared in 1975 with Adventures In Poetry/Big Sky, this is the full text of that enterprise. Bernadette Mayer is the author of more than two dozen volumes of poetry, including Midwinter Day, Sonnets, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, and Poetry State Forest. A former director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery and co-editor of the conceptual magazine 0 to 9 with Vito Acconci, Mayer has been a key figure on the New York poetry scene for decades. The book will be read by a wide range of luminaries including, Lee Ann Brown, Barbara Epler, Phil Good, Bernadette Mayer, Don Yorty, Michael Ruby, Marie Warsh, Lewis Warsh, Adam Fitzgerald, Peggy Decoursey, Bill Kushner, Bill Denoyelles, Deborah Poe, Peter Baker, Miles Champion, Anne Waldman and CA Conrad.
More information at Poetry Project and Facebook
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