False Memory (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Lopez, Tony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844710300 ISBN 13: 9781844710300

Publisher: Salt Publishing, 2003

Synopsis

False Memory is a major political poem of unusual ambition, written through the events of the 1990s, representing the damaged world that we know in all its violence and inequality. Making a radical turn to renew the language of political poetry, Lopez rejects the traditional search for authentic personal experience and its individual subjective voice. False Memory is overwhelmed by the globalized slogans of advertising, consumerism, and all the special jargons that atomize our contemporary experience from the spheres of marketing, biochemistry, military, medicine, management, history, finance, fashion, theory, poetry, painting and so on. Driven by an acute social anxiety that engages these public languages, the poem is comic in its proliferation of banality and impossible desire. The memory of Elizabethan sonnet sequences and the soft haze of their Arcadian sunlight meets the postmodern car-advert in a shiny retro-pastoral: a modular sequence of 110 fourteeners in gleaming halogen-lit chrome. “Virgil knew all about ethnic cleansing”.

Andrew Crozier writes that “In any of these stanzas language emits the toxic glow of an intertextuality for which a functioning media awareness is its sufficient context.… From the start this writing anticipates the post-modern as a future condition of the person”. Widely anthologized and excerpted in poetry journals throughout the English-speaking world, False Memory is published complete for the first time by Salt in 2003.

About this title

About the Author

Tony Lopez is the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction and criticism. His most recent poetry collections are Devolution (The Figures, USA) and Data Shadow (Reality Street, UK), both published in 2000. His work is featured in many anthologies including Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (Oxford), Other (Wesleyan) and Conductors of Chaos (Picador). He is well-known as a poetry performer and has given readings throughout UK, Europe and North America. He teaches in England at the University of Plymouth, where he was appointed the first professor of poetry in 2000.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

from Imitation of Life

City vending invites you to refresh yourself
With a fresh-brewed 3D simulator package
That clamps over the shoulder. By knowing size
And age at maturity, you can do hand-held:
You can split chaos from pure noise or fold it back in.
Target species caught at sea by hand or in nets,
Lost to medicine forever. A new shipment
Requires its own newsletter to be set up
In woven nomadic colours. No longer feeds.
Soon we could all be eating it. Knowledge hunger
A sudden decline in muscle cells. Wet data
Always begins with some injury or need.
Narrative formats in our wet brains,
Extraterrestrial garbage. No longer breeds.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt Publishing
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1844710300
• ISBN 13: 9781844710300
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 128