anticipatory nostalgia, meet infinite loss

food for thought an exercise, curated by The Poetry Foundation... happy Thursday

As you likely know, my poems are full of my deep complaints about “received narratives,” the difficulty of ascertaining truth re: historical events, Manhattan Project-era propaganda, and who gets to tell what stories.

I was happy to see this exercise up this morning on the Poetry Foundation by Casey Larkin Mazer Carsel. I thought it worth sharing with whoever might be out there this morning. Stumbling across this exercise coincides with my 310’s viewing of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen today, which feels fortuitous. Wish me luck as I dust off a DVD player from the library and attempt to hook it up to the modern classroom tech, will you?

History is heavy. It feeds some stories and starves others. It implies a certainty that is certainly false, and pretends to a nonexistent start—and an endpoint. William Faulkner was right to say “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

To craft poetry from history is to pull the past into the present—where its ghost hovers regardless—and to see anew what was, what is now, and what might be.

I am especially interested in Carsel’s explanation of “anticipatory nostalgia.” I’ll be munching on that phrase all day, in consideration of these lines fromAmy Catanzano’s “document” (from Multiversal):

“Looking backwards at something, 

all that can be recollected is the

single motion of moving forward

or backward too quickly. A loss,

however infinite.”

Catanzano is a genius at using syntactical ambiguity (along with line breaks) to create a constellation of possible meaning, productive abstraction. That “however infinite” — do you read it as, even though this is a loss, it is also infinite? Or: No matter how infinite it is, it’s always a loss? Or both?

happy Thursday,

Sara