I Forget
By John Kelsey
I forget the experience of a labyrinth unfolding step by step in the dark. The nights were longer then. I waited tables, worked on films, hung around with bands, took photos, wrote stuff, went to clubs. These activities were a cover for our true occupation, which was to extend the labyrinth with our zoned-out drift. I forget how we finally emerged from that place, but I know we had cell phones. Once we learn a new way of mapping the city, the old ways are useless, forgotten. And then it’s a labyrinth again.
An amnesiac poem that inverts the logic of Joe Brainard’s indelible I Remember, John Kelsey’s I Forget is a memoir fit for our era of information overload and erasure. With paradoxical precision, Kelsey catalogs forgettings minor and major, producing a portrait—of himself, of the recent cultural past—from the negative spaces of memory.
By John Kelsey
I forget the experience of a labyrinth unfolding step by step in the dark. The nights were longer then. I waited tables, worked on films, hung around with bands, took photos, wrote stuff, went to clubs. These activities were a cover for our true occupation, which was to extend the labyrinth with our zoned-out drift. I forget how we finally emerged from that place, but I know we had cell phones. Once we learn a new way of mapping the city, the old ways are useless, forgotten. And then it’s a labyrinth again.
An amnesiac poem that inverts the logic of Joe Brainard’s indelible I Remember, John Kelsey’s I Forget is a memoir fit for our era of information overload and erasure. With paradoxical precision, Kelsey catalogs forgettings minor and major, producing a portrait—of himself, of the recent cultural past—from the negative spaces of memory.
By John Kelsey
I forget the experience of a labyrinth unfolding step by step in the dark. The nights were longer then. I waited tables, worked on films, hung around with bands, took photos, wrote stuff, went to clubs. These activities were a cover for our true occupation, which was to extend the labyrinth with our zoned-out drift. I forget how we finally emerged from that place, but I know we had cell phones. Once we learn a new way of mapping the city, the old ways are useless, forgotten. And then it’s a labyrinth again.
An amnesiac poem that inverts the logic of Joe Brainard’s indelible I Remember, John Kelsey’s I Forget is a memoir fit for our era of information overload and erasure. With paradoxical precision, Kelsey catalogs forgettings minor and major, producing a portrait—of himself, of the recent cultural past—from the negative spaces of memory.