Arto Vaun: Writing Against Memory ~ CookingFood.Org

[Note: This post expands on some ideas that I discussed in response to questions posed by moderator Prof. Taline Voskeritchian at an event held on Feb 20, 2013 at The Armenian Library & Museum of America.]

Jorie Graham's PLACE won the 2012
Forward Prize for Poetry, and was
shortlisted for the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize

In The Given and the Made, Helen Vendler explores the ways in which poets master and are mastered by their personal fates, whether it be Berryman’s depression/alcoholism, Lowell’s prominent lineage (and depression), or Jorie Graham’s trilingualism. How do poets take unavoidable fate, or a given, and turn it into something made: poetry? And in what ways then is that given transformed, further problematized, or conquered?

These questions seemed salient to me in thinking about my own threads, jagged pieces, and ghosts that are often at play in my work. The title of my reading and discussion at The Armenian Library & Museum of America was ‘Writing Against Memory’ because memory is the unreliable force I try to tame, deflect, and seduce in my poems. And it, in turn, attempts to do those very things to me. Memory is my given—memory having to do with the Armenian Genocide, immigration, family trauma, bi-culturalism, tri-lingualism, and identity.

Arto Vaun explores these questions of
memory in his first collection,
Capillarity

Memory is often more sinister for those who have experienced collective trauma (or trauma of any sort). Already an inconstant property, for those peoples or individuals who survive trauma, memory often becomes a bully, over-riding the possibilities of the present moment with the stuckness and seemingly endless loop of the past traumatic event, especially if that event is unresolved, as in the Armenian Genocide or any crime or abuse that goes unpunished or unacknowledged. Perhaps more unsettling and problematic, such memory is often handed down generation to generation like a cassette tape which, copied over and over, loses its clarity and becomes harder and harder to understand through the white noise. In those cases, memory becomes more of a cracked, dirty souvenir; an obligation rather than something sprung from each self organically. So it is not memory in general that I am writing against, of course. It is the distorted part of memory, the part that becomes compulsive and tries to truncate continued growth and self-awareness.

Because poetry is the implosion and re-imagining of language, it has been my weapon and shield in combating the obsessive nature of my particular cultural memory handed down from the collective consciousness of the Armenian diaspora. One cannot extricate oneself from memory, of course. Nor is that my intention. But one can strive through art to vigilantly examine, explore, and remain aware of its complex and potentially subsuming power, and in so doing, to reassert one’s own self and independence from any ideological or narrowly scripted ideas of identity, nation, or past trauma.

As Vendler points out, there has always been a tension between lyric poetry and history. Where Milton or Wordsworth tackled this tension in their more political sonnets, poets after WWII have had to reckon with Freud. Psychology and the self turned inward make history, and in turn memory, a more problematic and stubborn riddle to unravel. The lyric becomes a deft tool in subverting and exploring the struggle between the contemporary fragmented self and the often misleading pull of memory. And in the most successful poems one finds slivers of grace, meaning, and beauty outside the convention and oppression of our everyday minds.

Praise for Capillarity by Arto Vaun:

Vaun is one of those inhabitants of the world who can't seem to settle, yet knows exactly where he's from.
Glasgow Herald

The writing is open and spacious, swerving constantly from intensely personal details [...] to a larger, more ambitious range as Vaun conjures his parents' Armenian background and his own experiences of growing up in the United States.
Charles Bainbridge, Guardian

Arto Vaun is a poet, songwriter, and musician from Cambridge, MA. He has attended Harvard and Glasgow University. His first collection, Capillarity, was published by Carcanet Press in 2009. He has appeared twice on The Verb (BBC3) and his poems have been included in The Forward Book of Poetry (2010), New Poetries V, Matter 10, Glimpse Journal, Ararat, Meridian, PN Review, and other publications. He has taught at Glasgow University, the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and Mass Bay College. He is the poetry editor for Glimpse Journal and is currently completing his second collection of poetry. His new record, The Cynthia Sessions, is being released this month.