Poetic Memory: The Forgotten Self in Plath, Howe, Hinsey, and Gluck

“Currently a psychoanalyst in training in the US, Gosmann has a PhD in American literature. Here she studies four poets, two well known (Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück), two less familiar (Susan Howe and Ellen Hinsey). She interviewed Glück, Howe, and Hinsey in preparation for writing this study. Gosmann situates her analysis in memory studies, a field currently prevalent in academic circles. She provides a definition of what she terms “poetic memory” in contrast to “historic memory,” poetic memory “posits that the self is more than the compound of a person’s remembered biography … [it] does not depend on accuracy, linearity, causality … [but] reaches beyond … toward a notion of a self that is dynamic, expansive, and full of potential.” Using this concept, along with the foundational ideas of Plutarch, Plotinus, and Freud, Gosmann closely reads selected work of each poet. She uses (and skillfully deploys) differing theoretical constructs for each chapter, as required by the “poets’ divergent mnemonics” Maurice Halbwachs (Plath); Freud, Kristeva, and Lacan (Howe); Walter Benjamin (Hinsey); and Jung (Glück). Gosmann asserts that a poem is “a map of consciousness … mental city or space … a space for psychological association.” Her analyses are provocative, well researched, and persuasive. Summing Up: Recommended.” —Choice Reviews

“This book is one of the sternest yet most generous accounts of contemporary poetry yet to be written. The sensibility behind it is at once delicate and hard-nosed. The author is a rare being–someone with strong theoretical leanings who also loves the texture of poetic language.Gosmann argues that poetic memory eschews simple-minded notions of linearity and accuracy in order to uncover the human subject’s intricate relationship to a past that in the most fundamental sense it cannot fully know. She attends to the poems of each of these poets, so different from one another, with pristine devotion: she can reinvigorate our interest in Plath’s most well-known poems and ignite our interest in a fine poet, Hinsey, whom readers may not yet have read. No one has written about Howe’s historiographic enterprise so clearly; no one has written about Glück’s relationship to psychoanalysis with such unidealized precision. The book has something for everyone–no, something more: to come to this book with an interest in, say, Howe, is to realize that one must also be interested in Glück. Very few books about contemporary art bring together what might seem to be mutually exclusive materials so convincingly.” –James Longenbach, Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English, University of Rochester