Jennifer Soongis a poet, literary critic, and assistant professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. She is the author of several books of poetry, including
Comeback Death,
Suede Mantis / Soft Rage, and the forthcoming
My Earliest Person.List of Figures
Introduction: Poetic Forgetting
1. And Action: Toward a New Knowledge
2. Forget It! Poetry Makes Nothing Happen
3. “Obvious Oblivion” and Lyn Hejinian’s Comic Affirmation
4. Origins and (Un)originality
5. Ambient Forgettability
Coda: A Reading Affair
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
Contrary to traditional Platonic epistemologies of remembrance, SoongsSlips of the Mindproposes a poetics of forgetfulness, laying out five main affordances of forgetting&.[t]his book would make an impressive addition to graduate-level creative writing and modern/contemporary poetry classes.
The book [provides] often intense local pleasures: I repeatedly felt that Soong was cogently, at times brilliantly articulating essential paradoxes that I had sensed in specific poems but been unable to formulate.
“Slips of the Mind is a poetics of forgetting, in which the condition is seen not merely as some regrettable lack, but rather as a positive creative principle in its own right. Soong discovers the allure of forgetting and the dazzling variety of phenomena that follow from it: formal, affective, stylistic, temporal. All of which refract back through Soong’s own prismatic writing, which is moving, beautifully styled, and meticulously crafted by turns.”
“A memorable case for forgetting. Articulating its aesthetics neither as mental symptom nor as intellectual lapse, Soong demonstrates how cultivated oblivion and the revivifying swerves of attention it can generate become the enabling condition for a writing of enactmentlÃÊ
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