"If we spend our lives remembering what we love/ to be sure who we are..." begins a Richard Hugo poem. The poet goes on, partly recalling and partly creating a remembrance of place and time. Of course, we don’t only remember “what we love,” but also what we lose, lack, long for, laugh at, or even loathe. The combination of recovery and creativity, the shaping, re-shaping, recalling and imaginative revising that constitutes memory, is, perhaps not coincidentally, very much the process of poetry.

How much of the poetry of memory rests on fact, and how much upon imagination? Are poems merely vehicles for expressing what we remember, and hope to preserve, or is memory also inherent in the language itself, if we trust it well, or draw from it deeply? Can poems (sound, metaphor, coherence, surprise, humor) possibly remember more than the poets who wrote them? We live in a time of fragmentation and forgetting, in the shadow of a pandemic and various cultural reckonings that need the very kind of remembering poetry provides, for both private and public reasons. Certainly, poems often call upon memory, but can we learn, as writers, to allow poems to help us remember? Is it even possible to think of memory, for better or worse, as our lifelong poem in progress?

Read more...