Memory and Modernism

It was an honor (and a little intimidating) to address a plenary session of the American Psychoanalytic Association last January. The effort to say something useful from the viewpoint of poetry about the discipline of analysis has contributed to my thinking about my art, and I am grateful for that.

A personal custom of speaking to an audience, rather than reading from a text, means there is no written version of the talk. As with many forms of human speech and conversation, perhaps including both of the disciplines involved, a literal transcript might be distorting, in any case. Any transcript leaves out the corporeal part of discourse—which poetry strives to re-create as its end, and where psychoanalysis, as I understand it, begins.

So instead, here is a summary of the presentation, which involved a general proposition and a series of examples. The effort was to see psychoanalysis—in its roots and also in its recent stresses, doubts, and internal debates—as part of modernism, and therefore subject to the still-evolving cultural fate of modernism. I tried to take a step toward seeing the internal debates of poetry (which also has its stresses, doubts, and internal debates) and psychoanalysis, both, as reflecting the fate of modernism as a radical and perpetually resisted mode of memory.

The first example was a two-line poem by the nineteenth-century poet Walter Savage Landor:

On love, on grief, on every human thing,

Time sprinkles Lethe's water with his wing.

This easily memorizable poem embodies a contradiction—in part, precisely because it is so memorizable. The lines about universal forgetting quite literally embody themselves in memory: the reader's upper teeth on