Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting (Thinking Literature)

An audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting.In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting's longstanding associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle.Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning.What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow?What is oblivion's relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions?Soong uncovers forgetting's influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others.She reveals tha