The Forms Memories Take

Memories are not always clear and linear. I know many of my own memories can be hazy, nebulous, and somehow all the while vivid and crisp—surreal, even. Interestingly enough, these strange recollections are the ones I turn over the most, as if the very fact that these seemingly insignificant details have transformed into colorful memories that have stuck with me all this time must mean there is a profundity in them that deserves examining.  I do most of this scrutinizing in my writing. Perhaps my favorite aspect of writing is the flexibility through which I can choose to express and explore (and at times dissect) my psychological ties to the images and sensory detail from my memory.

As a writer who has dabbled in both creative nonfiction and poetry, I could say there is a method to the way that I choose whether I’d like to convey these kinds of memories in an essay or a poem. Would I rather bare my soul in paragraphs or stanzas? Sentences or lines? And then from there, how can I be clever with my structure, how can I lead my form to follow function?  The truth is there is no real answer I can give, no way I can adequately clarify how I make certain distinctions.  What I can say is this: either way, writers will have to go with their gut.  For me, if the memory I want to convey in my writing is something that is specific and can be arranged chronologically, I might turn to an essay format (though admittedly, I particularly enjoy writing lyrical essays which may utilize a poetic device or two.)  Even in essay format, I find it difficult not to incorporate lyricism when unpacking a memory, but then again, for me, nostalgia has always been hard to deliver without a song. For my more bizarre, dreamlike memories, I turn to poem format much more often.

My poetry, not unlike my other writing, is usually approached with a degree of emotional distance rather than erring on the side of confessional.  When describing or conveying a memory in my poetry, I think this distance allows me a kind of dexterity, an ability to manipulate form and language to illustrate the stranger details of a memory—for instance, a peculiar scent that recalls candy, flowers, plums, and rubber from when I was five years old, the one that would make me ache with the absence of fancy-free youth if I smelled it now. Something about the brevity, and concurrently the great depth, of such a memory certainly lends itself to poetry, which in some ways seems to perfectly serve this type of memory in its own format—brief and insightful.  Phrases that sound like the taste of my grandmother’s spaghetti on Easter weekend, words that feel as toasty as the fireplace in my childhood home—sometimes only the musicality of language in poetry can express that flash of emotion and color buried in my mind’s eye.

Maddy García is a first-year poetry MFA Candidate and instructor of English composition at FAU. Much of her work grapples with identity, ambiguity of form, and the human experience juxtaposed against the cosmos. She is also a visual artist and, in her free time, she enjoys cooking and surrounding herself with cats.