Class

On The Poetics of Delusion: Memory, Forgetting, and the Fragment in Poetry

When C.D. Wright wrote about that evening after the dinner with Frank Stanford and his wife, Linda Mencin, she did so with a remembering of everything but the event itself. Was that forgetting or deflecting—or the inability to access what is critical, the room, how dark it was, the faces, and the moon spilling into the room? What was left unsaid? Perhaps the answer lies in the more complicated narrative of Steve Scafidi’s Driving Around, or in Brian Gyamfi’s Almost Love of Kofi and Eloise, where the poem’s truth flickers not in certainty but in the fracture.

Memory and the voice of the narrator are often treated as stable, a clear image or scene from which a poem may unfold. But what happens when memory stutters, distorts, or disappears? What happens when we allow forgetting to share authorship in our writing? In this workshop, we’ll explore how memory’s ruptures, omissions, and nonlinearities can open a more dynamic sense of truth in poetry—how the unreliability of a speaker might deepen, rather than diminish, meaning.

Through readings of poets whose work navigates remembering what is difficult, or witnessing and retelling, we will think about what it means to remember partially, to record incompletely, to trust the half-formed recollection. Participants will write from the thresholds of what they remember and what they cannot, exploring how fragmentation, silence, and unreliability might generate new structures of narrative and lyric movement.

This is a generative workshop open to all levels. Writers will leave with new drafts, a set of reading references, and strategies for using memory’s instability as a creative engine—how to turn the act of forgetting into form, and how to locate beauty in what resists being fully recalled.

All Classes listed on the Loft website take place in Central Time.

Instructions for Accessing This Online Class

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