PAMLA San Francisco: Memory and Loss in Contemporary North American Documental Poetry
This panel explores Michael Leong’s recent association between “documental” poetry—poetry that draws on and/or revises official or invented documents—and explorations of memory broadly construed, including forgotten historical events, the plight of unrepresented people(s), and the psychological and/or physiological workings of memory itself. How do such works define memory? To what extent are the workings of memory affirmed in these works? To what extent are processes of remembering obstructed, disrupted, or fragmented?