How do poems remember? What kinds of memory do poems register that factual, chronological accounts of the past are oblivious to? What is the self created by such practices of memory? To answer these questions, Uta Gosmann introduces a general theory of “poetic memory,” a manner of thinking that eschews simple-minded notions of linearity and accuracy in order to uncover the human subject’s intricate relationship to a past that it cannot fully know. Gosmann explores poetic memory in the work of Sylvia Plath, Susan Howe, Ellen Hinsey, and Louise Glück, four American poets writing in a wide range of styles and discussed here for the first time together. Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and thinkers from Nietzsche and Benjamin to Halbwachs and Kristeva, Gosmann uses these demanding poets to articulate an alternative, non-empirical model of the self in poetry.
Currently a psychoanalyst in training in the US, Gosmann has a PhD in American literature. Here she studies four poets, two well known (Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück), two less familiar (Susan Howe and Ellen Hinsey). She interviewed Glück, Howe, and Hinsey in preparation for writing this study. Gosmann situates her analysis in memory studies, a field currently prevalent in academic circles. She provides a definition of what she terms "poetic memory": in contrast to "historic memory," poetic memory "posits that the self is more than the compound of a person's remembered biography ... [it] does not depend on accuracy, linearity, causality ... [but] reaches beyond ... toward a notion of a self that is dynamic, expansive, and full of potential." Using this concept, along with the foundational ideas of Plutarch, Plotinus, and Freud, Gosmann closely reads selected work of each poet. She uses (and skillfully deploys) differing theoretical constructs for each chapter, as required by the "poets' divergent mnemonics": Maurice Halbwachs (Plath); Freud, Kristeva, and Lacan (Howe); Walter Benjamin (Hinsey); and Jung (Glück). Gosmann asserts that a poem is "a map of consciousness ... mental city or space ... a space for psychological association." Her analyses are provocative, well researched, and persuasive. Summing Up: Recommended.
