Jennifer Soong begins her new collection of poems, My Earliest Person (The Last Books, 2025), in the heroic register:

As she makes clear in her critical monograph Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Soong alights firmly in the camp of Maurice Blanchot, who “in describing the poet’s inspiration, insisted that a memory with no recollection of its start has forgetting as its very essence…” In her monograph, Soong explores the nature and variety of poetic forgetting through case studies of Bernadette Mayer, John Ashbery, and others, to free forgetting from its negative, relational context. For Soong, and the writers she explores in this book, forgetting, more than the opposite of remembering, is a much more complex literary tool.

With the photos gone, Soong is free to begin the poem, and her book. She inscribes a similar period of inaction at the beginning of her previous volume, Comeback Death (Krupskaya, 2024): “those years I did nothing, was nobody / to myself.” In deleting the evidence to the poem, Soong unwrites My Earliest Person, producing a book that shimmers through the sluice gate of forgetting, drifting through style and form seamlessly, with no titles or sections, ending mere centimeters before the colophon on the final page.

Soong, in the essays of Slips of the Mind, produces an abbreviated Burtonian Anatomy of Forgetting, with essays on the role of forgetting in the works of Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Lissa Wolsak, Charles Bernstein, Harryette Mullen, and Tan Lin, while glancing across the bow of one thousand years of philosophy, literature, and theory. My copies of both books warped in the heat and rain, stuffed with neon yellow post-its; one becomes certain that we, in the Land of Forgetting, in the Age of Somnabulence, needed a chronicler of the myriad textures of forgetting, both ambient or not.

One of the textures of forgetting is not remembering where and when one enters into a space, or into a line in a poem, which is a technique so readily apparent in the works of John Ashbery; that what seems like a non-sequitur, or misprision, is actually an abbreviated detour, although the connecting thruways that Soong uses are hidden from the reader. Soong collapses modes, moving from arch lyricism to disarming confessions, flat in tone but startling in their directness. She writes:

Soong’s attentiveness to sound is strong here: she used rough-edged machinic language, “jacked,” nestled inside the brusque clipped elegiac image of years flying by. Out of this tenseness, the next line emerges smooth, like the clearest thought one might have had in a while, and cool, before plummeting back into the angular sound of skived, and we’re back in the forgetting. Combining Ashbery and Lyn Hejinian’s disorienting register shifts with Lissa Wolsak’s curt caesuras, Soong employs a phonetics of forgetting, crashing phonemes into oblivion for a stanza before gliding for another stanza, or building up the melody again. By so fluently shifting form, register, or syntax, the words Soong uses feel like signposts for all that is unspoken, representatives from the void of unspeech, and silence.

Soong’s quick form changes are perhaps most visible in the sequence poem, “Island,” near the end of the collection. She moves from the condensed Celan-ian syntax of Section 3:

Here clutch and brood pull double duty as maternal metaphors, signifying to grasp or a nest of eggs, and to think anxiously or animal young. The sentences abruptly end, and the reader is left in this dense chitinous and lonely seaside abyss, before moving into the recít of Section 4:

Walter Pater wrote that all art aspires to the condition of music; for Soong, singing surpasses speaking, and all speech aspires to the condition of silence—an invocation, like in the opening of the book, to the muses of silence and waiting. Soong’s confessional mode is formal and elegiac, again recalling the moments of blunt clarity in an Ashbery or Padgett list poem; the relationship between speaker and subject is stark and blindingly direct.

Amidst all this, it is hard to ignore that we are in an era of politically useful, and forcibly administered, forgetting. This lack of presence of mind, in the barrage of news updates, doomscrolling (which Soong addresses in the chapter on Tan Lin’s HEATH COURSE PAK), shit HBO, Spotify AI trash, might more accurately be called repression. We forget that our enemy is organized, that there is a genocide going on, and that forced forgetting is a pragmatic and useful political tool. Forgetting, understandably, has a generally negative connotation.

But Soong points to instances of productive forgetting. In Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy, forgetting indexes a shift from individuality to sociality, ‘elevating amnesia’s status... to an essential turbine for poetic creation.” John Ashbery uses the to-do list format in “The Instruction Manual” to resist the pressures of his job, which he “turns away from in the name of alternative wishes, affective journeys, and daydreams.” For Gertrude Stein forgetting is non-cumulative, non-progressive, a negative response to the nineteenth century, producing “a way of knowing that is rooted in difference and distinction rather than similarity.”

Forgetting is both an aesthetic textual effect and a tool used by the writer. It evades binaries: forgetting is not the opposite of remembering, and remembering is not action. Forgetting resists fetishization. Forgetting is non-cumulative. Forgetting can be an effect of the poem, and how jokes work. Forgetting offers a feeling of futurity. Fascist presentism, like the 24-hour news cycle atrocity exhibition, obviates any possibility of radical organization—forgetting offers an exit ramp from the present. Forgetting is a cognitive tool, like in Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, where she uses photographic documentation to create new gaps in her memory. Most important, forgetting, like poetic experience, is a corporeal event. In forgetting, as Soong writes in “Island,” “the mind’s the only thing left moving.”

Soong embraces the slipperiness of forgetting as a tool as she embraces the slipperiness of the English language. Her words are variable in their meanings, and she switches registers and tones from line to line, packing allusions, styles, and references in to capture a whole spectrum of grief, loss, and memory.

Later in the sequence poem “Island,” Soong writes, “to start is unable to turn back; it is extremely difficult and thick in the air. we are what we did to ourselves, the marks suggest we were there when we were born.” Like Zeus, who, through some trick, is present at the birth of the universe, the hatching of the snake from the omphalic egg, Soong enters a period before historical time, a period of pure paradox, where the beginning and end are encoded in every action. Her narrator becomes unmoored: sometimes trying to find the eponymous earliest person, sometimes resigned to silence, or singing, or loneliness. Earlier, she writes, “where in this / do I say it’s not hard. to / discover the ending or the / ‘real’ subject. in here / I still get to see you, / change…” Soong enters into a confessional mode, shifting her address from the person to the reader, both changing, all of us hard to grasp. The poem, or this book, becomes this constructed space, outside of time or consequence.

For Soong, as she writes in “Ode to Inexperience,” “What is actual, is / what we desire on.” Forgetting brings what is actual into focus. Through form, like the narrow columns of this ode, or sonnets present elsewhere in the book, or skittering broken enjambment, excess language is discarded, while new images are brought sharply into focus. Soong enacts forgetting, and like Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, and Ashbery, in doing so, produces new avenues of thought. In losing a lover, or a parent, or one of the endless things lost every day, to us and to everyone living on this earth, we experience useful oblivion, which produces a sort of collective record of forgetting. Literature becomes almost an akashic record through which we can access all the things we forget, through all of history and before it, and the various textures and uses of that forgetting. Soong ends one of her poems:

In this world where the sound of bombs are always coming to us, may we all forget, in order to remember.