American poet Bernadette Mayer notes in the beginning
of Studying Hunger Journals (2011) that “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 … someone could come up with a
great piece of language”-. Mayer started working on her Studying
Hunger Journals project in the 1970s while
she was seeing a psychoanalyst. She gave the journals to her analyst to read,
but they also became a literary text, which was partially published in 1975 and
in its entirety in 2011.

While it is obvious that it is impossible to
transcribe every thought that crosses one’s mind to produce such “a great piece
of language”, Studying Hunger Journals does present a poetic experiment
in that direction. In her hybrid poetry memoir, Mayer observes her emotional
reactions and changes in her states of mind in a stream-of-consciousness style.