Shorter American Memory

“Shorter American Memory” is a collection of prose poems by Rosmarie Waldrop, one of the poets who visited this semester as part of the English Department’s Literary Series. I read “Shorter American Memory” for another class this semester and found it to be an incredible reading experience, and so considered adding the piece to our suggested reading list based on a tenuous similarity to the writing process Katherine Hayles describes in her chapter on “The Humument” -- Rosmarie Waldrop crafted “Shorter American Memory” by undertaking what she calls an abridgement, or collage poetry. That is, working with the text of “American Memory,” a high school textbook on U.S. history, Ms. Waldrop went through the existing order of the text and its chapters -- selecting words, phrases, and fragments either according to certain rules or according to her whims -- to create her own version of American Memory.

However, while I ultimately decided that my urge to recommend came more from my enjoyment of the text than a justifiable relation to our class material, I did wind up using the principle at work in both “A Humument” and “Shorter American Memory” in my final project. To quote again from my own appendix:
To demonstrate the virtue of the non-linear narrative community that resides inherently in a memory palace, and hence in hypertext, I’ve integrated into the palace a somewhat concealed link to a lexia titled “allfalldown.” I composed the text of this lexia by strictly following the order of the floor plan and taking a word or phrase from both the first and final sentence of each lexia, and then assembling the bits of text according to the floorplan's layout. This abridged version of the full hypertext, if you will, is intended to provide an example of the chaos that can befall a metaphor, a memory, a narrative if the organizing principle of random-access is removed, and all the associative bits and pieces are allowed to line up like ducks in a row along the flat, still, and “murky pool of one’s undifferentiated and disorganized memory.”

While I’m not sure if my use of Rosmarie Waldrop’s or Tom Phillips’s compositional method successfully demonstrated my point, it was a very interesting way of working with text, and I’d still recommend “Shorter American Memory” -- not only are the prose poems strikingly gorgeous at times, but reading for the words between the words between the words in front of you, even as you’re reading the words in front of you, is a wonderfully trippy way to get yourself thinking about the mechanism of language and all the illusions we buy into.