“I Do Not Intend to be the End Result of Anything”: Notes on a Critically Mindful Poetics

Abstract

This essay explores the poetry of Lyn Hejinian and Bernadette Mayer through the framework of critical mindfulness. The essay develops this framework through a critique of dominant notions of mindfulness and mindful poetics and through an application of affectively oriented Buddhist social theory. The essay argues that both Hejinian’s and Mayer’s poetry model modes of consciousness and ways of being that cultivate presence with the fluidity and entanglements of everyday life.