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Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting
An audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting.
In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting’s long-standing associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion’s relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions?
Soong uncovers forgetting’s influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting’s shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality—and that such malleability is part of forgetting’s nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.
In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting’s long-standing associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion’s relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions?
Soong uncovers forgetting’s influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting’s shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality—and that such malleability is part of forgetting’s nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.
220 pages, Paperback
Published April 7, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 17, 2025
We need more work like this.
August 3, 2025
I wrote a much shorter review for ChoiceConnect (<200 words!), so I wanted to give a more in-depth review here to do the text justice.
Jennifer Soong proposes an antidote to what I would like to call "lacunaphobia" through what she calls "poetic forgetting." Both of us have noticed that the modern age has an intense anxiety around gaps, especially gaps in knowledge. The premoderns notably plugged this gap with theology, which works well insofar as it remains mystical and paradoxical. However, skeptical moderns fear the gap, and both premoderns and post-moderns are better suited to dealing with the gap. We both do better than merely deal with the gap, we use the gap as an empty space for generating new ideas. The best of us progress past utilitarian "use" of it into an active and reciprocal relationship with it ("If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you").
Soong starts by convincingly linking "remembrance" with Platonic epistemology; thus the western tradition as a whole generally sees forgetting as bad and remembering as good (moral) and linked to knowledge (epistemological). Even Islam has a similar idea in their term for conversion ("reversion" i.e. to the default state) and their practice of whispering adhaan into the ear of the newborn. All of this helps explain how most education has operated throughout the centuries, with the strong emphasis on memorization and accurate recall. However, this threatens to accumulate into the worthless encyclopedic "sciencia sine sapientia" which we moderns are so often mired in. Thus, forgetting can "eliminate the trivial" as Pound says (and Soong points out).
In her first chapter, Soong explains how Gertrude Stein's poetic forgetting of grammar, syntax, definitions, associations, and cliches can dramatically open up the language (and thus the mind) to new opportunities. This is an extreme example of poetry's longstanding mastery over the cutting edge of lingustic beauty and precision. Philosophy, especially that of Kant and Hegel, tends to dull and kill language in its excessive precision and abstractness. Poetry, especially experimental poetry, however has a vivacity to it which stretches the limit of what is thinkable and feelable. It does this at least in part by the poet temporarily allowing themself to forget prefab cliches and instead get as close as they can to pure perception, allowing strange, novel, and even taboo associations to arise. The really masterly poet can let these arise on the page or in their mind, and dispassionately decide between them.
Though Soong uses Stein's work to illustrate her points quite well, I'm struck by how clunky and inaccurate some of Stein's formulations were (simple quotation marks, parenthesis, italicizations, commas, etc. would have sufficed to make her ideas clearer. I understand that a large part of her modus operandi was to defamiliarize the act of reading, to "reflect on the reading as we are reading," but you need not be so unclear as some of the quotes used. Oh well, I shouldn't pass so much judgement, I haven't read much of any Stein before this. I did however notice that after about the first half of each chapter, Soong unfortunately went off on so many particulars without really developing her ideas any further. Maybe it's cruel to complain about that, but that's the main reason for the two missing stars in my rating. I think that a more brutal editor (especially one familiar with the works of Byung Chul Han, whose books sometimes are ~70 pages long, but every page is bursting with energy) would have helped cut the length down and make the book much more palatable for general audiences. As it is, it gets bogged down as each chapter goes on, and the nutrient-dense starts eventually run out of steam as they drag on.
The second chapter was a fun exploration of the New York School's use of To-Do List poetry, which basically is a way to write down so you can afford to forget. In this case, it allows you to be unburdened by the weight of remembering the future, so you can actually act in the present. We all know the feeling, I don't need to really elaborate. She calls it "prospective memory", and it's a great way to expand the chronological discussion around remembering/forgetting, especially since they're usually supposed to deal with the past, not the future.
Like the other chapters, this one ran out of steam, however, and the only part I really latched onto in the second half was about the east/west coast distinction, where the west coast (LA) thinks you have to do something for it to count, the east coast is comfortable with the distance of merely seeing/reading about/writing about/thinking about a topic. To me, it seems like a mind/body split, one where the LA crowd does things just to say they've done them, whereas the NY crowd would rather romanticize, idealize, and yearn, which is much more my speed.
The third chapter used an author I don't know (Lyn Hejinian) to make an interesting point about the poles of tragedy/comedy, individual/social, remembering/forgetting; forgetting, like comedy and the social, allows for more blurred boundaries, more liminality, whereas tragedy, the individual, and remembering all try in vain to make these stark borderlines. It's what I've argued in the past about categories and boundaries, and Soong added some cool new polarities to the discussion, which I appreciate. I'm not really sold that either side is better or worse, nor even that the forgetting side is any more poetically generative, but they are generative in different directions and at different volumes.
The fourth chapter held what was for me the most important moment of the book. Right around page 100, Soong brought St. Augustine into the fray, and he described the tension I had been feeling the whole book but which had yet to be elaborated: forgetting requires remembering. The two cannot be neatly separated: all flashes of forgetting start with the realization that you have only partially remembered something. In other words, forgetting isn't total oblivion, as some of the other parts of the book have insinuated; the two are worlds apart. Oblivion isn't even recognizable, and thus probably isn't worth being talked about (maybe isn't even able to be talked about?). Forgetting, however, is this faint tap on the shoulder, and it bothers us because we know it should be around here somewhere. But where? How do we figure misplaced memories? Spatially? If so, where does it go?
Soong beautifully writes: "For Auden and Augustine, writing and thinking begin with what 'one cannot remember' and are followed by a consideration of contending options." Thus, forgetting draws attention to itself, or rather to a gap; it's up to us what we want to do with it. We can worry over it and keep trying blocks until one fits through the hole ("that's right, the square hole!"), or we can use it as an exploratory opportunity, being freed temporarily from remembrance and certainty. Being comfortable with this discomfort is in my opinion an ideal one can achieve through studying and mimicking great poets, philosophers, and theologians. Soong concludes that mis-remembered repetition (like that in Beckett plays) can create anaphoric poetry or aphoristic philosophy, both of which help us to escape stiflingly linear rationalism and prose.
The final chapter I by far enjoyed the least, especially insofar as it referenced Warhol, who I imagine burning in Art-Hell second only to Duchamp. The key concept in this chapter was "ambient forgetting," and if I understood what she was describing, I actively would want to discourage people from attempting this kind of mindless, dissociative browsing (not least because too many people already do it). Stop aestheticizing laziness and doomscrolling...? It's not meaningfully generative, or if it is, it's sub-par compared to all the other approaches she described. A few times, she mentioned "attention economies," but I'd much rather hear what Han or Zizek have to say about that, rather than Warhol or Tan Lin.
All this to say, Jennifer Soong is an exceptionally intelligent person, and it was a blast to read this book for review, but I pity her second halves of these chapters. I genuinely don't think they needed to carry on for that long, and I suspect it was either editors telling her to fluff it out more, or, worse, it was prompted on by Soong's expectations of "what editors want." I feel like there's an unfortunate amount of posturing which goes on in academia, especially the variety which results in bloat. I'm of the opinion that every sentence should be a bomb ready to go off, like you get in Nietzsche or any of the really vital writers. Long length should never be a goal for writers, only content, and if possible, economy of words.
Jennifer Soong proposes an antidote to what I would like to call "lacunaphobia" through what she calls "poetic forgetting." Both of us have noticed that the modern age has an intense anxiety around gaps, especially gaps in knowledge. The premoderns notably plugged this gap with theology, which works well insofar as it remains mystical and paradoxical. However, skeptical moderns fear the gap, and both premoderns and post-moderns are better suited to dealing with the gap. We both do better than merely deal with the gap, we use the gap as an empty space for generating new ideas. The best of us progress past utilitarian "use" of it into an active and reciprocal relationship with it ("If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you").
Soong starts by convincingly linking "remembrance" with Platonic epistemology; thus the western tradition as a whole generally sees forgetting as bad and remembering as good (moral) and linked to knowledge (epistemological). Even Islam has a similar idea in their term for conversion ("reversion" i.e. to the default state) and their practice of whispering adhaan into the ear of the newborn. All of this helps explain how most education has operated throughout the centuries, with the strong emphasis on memorization and accurate recall. However, this threatens to accumulate into the worthless encyclopedic "sciencia sine sapientia" which we moderns are so often mired in. Thus, forgetting can "eliminate the trivial" as Pound says (and Soong points out).
In her first chapter, Soong explains how Gertrude Stein's poetic forgetting of grammar, syntax, definitions, associations, and cliches can dramatically open up the language (and thus the mind) to new opportunities. This is an extreme example of poetry's longstanding mastery over the cutting edge of lingustic beauty and precision. Philosophy, especially that of Kant and Hegel, tends to dull and kill language in its excessive precision and abstractness. Poetry, especially experimental poetry, however has a vivacity to it which stretches the limit of what is thinkable and feelable. It does this at least in part by the poet temporarily allowing themself to forget prefab cliches and instead get as close as they can to pure perception, allowing strange, novel, and even taboo associations to arise. The really masterly poet can let these arise on the page or in their mind, and dispassionately decide between them.
Though Soong uses Stein's work to illustrate her points quite well, I'm struck by how clunky and inaccurate some of Stein's formulations were (simple quotation marks, parenthesis, italicizations, commas, etc. would have sufficed to make her ideas clearer. I understand that a large part of her modus operandi was to defamiliarize the act of reading, to "reflect on the reading as we are reading," but you need not be so unclear as some of the quotes used. Oh well, I shouldn't pass so much judgement, I haven't read much of any Stein before this. I did however notice that after about the first half of each chapter, Soong unfortunately went off on so many particulars without really developing her ideas any further. Maybe it's cruel to complain about that, but that's the main reason for the two missing stars in my rating. I think that a more brutal editor (especially one familiar with the works of Byung Chul Han, whose books sometimes are ~70 pages long, but every page is bursting with energy) would have helped cut the length down and make the book much more palatable for general audiences. As it is, it gets bogged down as each chapter goes on, and the nutrient-dense starts eventually run out of steam as they drag on.
The second chapter was a fun exploration of the New York School's use of To-Do List poetry, which basically is a way to write down so you can afford to forget. In this case, it allows you to be unburdened by the weight of remembering the future, so you can actually act in the present. We all know the feeling, I don't need to really elaborate. She calls it "prospective memory", and it's a great way to expand the chronological discussion around remembering/forgetting, especially since they're usually supposed to deal with the past, not the future.
Like the other chapters, this one ran out of steam, however, and the only part I really latched onto in the second half was about the east/west coast distinction, where the west coast (LA) thinks you have to do something for it to count, the east coast is comfortable with the distance of merely seeing/reading about/writing about/thinking about a topic. To me, it seems like a mind/body split, one where the LA crowd does things just to say they've done them, whereas the NY crowd would rather romanticize, idealize, and yearn, which is much more my speed.
The third chapter used an author I don't know (Lyn Hejinian) to make an interesting point about the poles of tragedy/comedy, individual/social, remembering/forgetting; forgetting, like comedy and the social, allows for more blurred boundaries, more liminality, whereas tragedy, the individual, and remembering all try in vain to make these stark borderlines. It's what I've argued in the past about categories and boundaries, and Soong added some cool new polarities to the discussion, which I appreciate. I'm not really sold that either side is better or worse, nor even that the forgetting side is any more poetically generative, but they are generative in different directions and at different volumes.
The fourth chapter held what was for me the most important moment of the book. Right around page 100, Soong brought St. Augustine into the fray, and he described the tension I had been feeling the whole book but which had yet to be elaborated: forgetting requires remembering. The two cannot be neatly separated: all flashes of forgetting start with the realization that you have only partially remembered something. In other words, forgetting isn't total oblivion, as some of the other parts of the book have insinuated; the two are worlds apart. Oblivion isn't even recognizable, and thus probably isn't worth being talked about (maybe isn't even able to be talked about?). Forgetting, however, is this faint tap on the shoulder, and it bothers us because we know it should be around here somewhere. But where? How do we figure misplaced memories? Spatially? If so, where does it go?
Soong beautifully writes: "For Auden and Augustine, writing and thinking begin with what 'one cannot remember' and are followed by a consideration of contending options." Thus, forgetting draws attention to itself, or rather to a gap; it's up to us what we want to do with it. We can worry over it and keep trying blocks until one fits through the hole ("that's right, the square hole!"), or we can use it as an exploratory opportunity, being freed temporarily from remembrance and certainty. Being comfortable with this discomfort is in my opinion an ideal one can achieve through studying and mimicking great poets, philosophers, and theologians. Soong concludes that mis-remembered repetition (like that in Beckett plays) can create anaphoric poetry or aphoristic philosophy, both of which help us to escape stiflingly linear rationalism and prose.
The final chapter I by far enjoyed the least, especially insofar as it referenced Warhol, who I imagine burning in Art-Hell second only to Duchamp. The key concept in this chapter was "ambient forgetting," and if I understood what she was describing, I actively would want to discourage people from attempting this kind of mindless, dissociative browsing (not least because too many people already do it). Stop aestheticizing laziness and doomscrolling...? It's not meaningfully generative, or if it is, it's sub-par compared to all the other approaches she described. A few times, she mentioned "attention economies," but I'd much rather hear what Han or Zizek have to say about that, rather than Warhol or Tan Lin.
All this to say, Jennifer Soong is an exceptionally intelligent person, and it was a blast to read this book for review, but I pity her second halves of these chapters. I genuinely don't think they needed to carry on for that long, and I suspect it was either editors telling her to fluff it out more, or, worse, it was prompted on by Soong's expectations of "what editors want." I feel like there's an unfortunate amount of posturing which goes on in academia, especially the variety which results in bloat. I'm of the opinion that every sentence should be a bomb ready to go off, like you get in Nietzsche or any of the really vital writers. Long length should never be a goal for writers, only content, and if possible, economy of words.
January 27, 2026
Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting by Jennifer Soong is a fascinating exploration of memory, creativity, and the poetic process. Soong examines how forgetting can become a generative force in literature, revealing its influence on poets from Gertrude Stein to the New York School.
This work is both intellectually rigorous and thought-provoking, showing how lapses in memory open space for innovation, style, and surprise in poetry. A must-read for scholars, poetry enthusiasts, and readers curious about the intersection of creativity and cognition.
This work is both intellectually rigorous and thought-provoking, showing how lapses in memory open space for innovation, style, and surprise in poetry. A must-read for scholars, poetry enthusiasts, and readers curious about the intersection of creativity and cognition.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews