A Poetry Mixtape Edited by Michael Prior
Michael's Liner Notes
“Memory is genius,” the poet Robert Lowell once remarked. Memory has been and continues to be an obsession for many poets, who have grappled with its clarities and omissions, its vividness and uncertainties. Ancient Greek bards often began their performances by invoking Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory; Bashō juxtaposes the Kyoto of his past with the Kyoto of his present; and Audre Lorde asserts that for those who are oppressed, memory and awareness of its communally constructed cousin, history, can catalyze acts of resistance, writing in “Litany for Survival,” “So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.” Memory, as inextricable from our experience of time, might be one of poetry’s main mediums alongside language.
But of course, memory’s processes are not exactly the same for us all. Memory is foundational to identity. The memories we inherit and accrue—which become the stories that make up the story of our life—differ greatly depending on the families and communities we are born into or choose. Our sense of belonging or exclusion, our experiences of safety or violence (or the threat of violence) ineffably shape what and how we remember.
In this poetic mixtape, I’ve curated a selection of poems by BIPOC poets whose work explores various forms of memory, ranging from the personal and the generational to the cultural and the national. These poems pose questions about why we remember and forget what we do, and how remembering and forgetting are often, as Lorde suggests, tied to survival. Some of these poems also ask us to consider where memory might be located beyond the mind—in a body, between bodies, in places and objects, in the ebb and flow of the tides—as well as how the social forces and institutions in our lives might urge us to forget what we most vitally need to remember—or, conversely, urge us to remember what we would rather forget.
It’s been proposed that in many cultures early poems served as mnemonic vessels, their formal features developing, at least to some degree, as a means by which to make them easier to memorize and to transmit. It’s a common notion as well that a poem’s resonance is tied to the memorability of its language; and whether a poem’s language is memorable or not is frequently a result of the ways its aboutness and its construction constitute one another—that is, how form can be metaphor.
Many of the poems in this mixtape evoke different types of memory by inhabiting forms that enact the very processes of remembering and forgetting that their speakers experience. Take, for example, the way Chuqiao Yang uses the reiterating end-words of her sestina, “Family Tree,” to fluidly conjure the repeated mythologies and haunting sense of exile that characterizes her speaker’s family’s “migration and history;” or consider how Sally Wen Mao employs multiple margins and caesurae in “Wet Market” to not only acknowledge the gaps in the memories her speaker has inherited from her parents, but also to skip between multiple modes of memory, spanning the personal and the cultural (such as when the poem evokes “Angel Island’s quarantine station”). Or think about how Ishion Hutchinson uses the long, stichic (single-stanza) structure of “Bicycle Eclogue” to recreate the sudden rush of episodic memory that pulls his speaker back in time and across an ocean to his Jamaican childhood; and what about how Eduardo C. Corral integrates repeated phrases into a version of the triadic line (devised by William Carlos Williams) in “Autobiography of My Hungers” to express his speaker’s fragmented and deeply painful memories of unrequited love. Or contemplate the way Tiana Clark crafts insistent anaphora in “The Ayes Have It” to convey the relentless, racist violence faced by Black people in America. After noting that memory was, in art, a sort of genius, Lowell, added “But you have to do something with it.” And these poets certainly have. I hope what they’ve done—how they’ve explored questions of remembrance and forgetting—offers you moments of solace, discovery, challenge, and inspiration. Perhaps you’ll even decide to memorize one of these poems.
