Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting

by Jennifer Soong

Overview

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 long-standing 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 that forgetting’s shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality—and that such malleability is part of forgetting’s nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226839905
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/07/2025
Series:	Thinking Literature
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Soong is 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.

Jennifer Soong is 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.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

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.

author of "Radium of the Word" Craig Dworkin

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 enactment (rather than reportage) and the secret (lost) thread that would tie Stein to the New York School, Language writing, and Conceptualism. As Soong shows, this writing defamiliarizes our history of defamiliarization by forgetting its canonical theorists and reinventing its concerns as the problem of every actual present.

author of "Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Resear Lytle Shaw