Poetry Workshop: The Archive of Remembering and Forgetting

In his book Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, ‘all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory’. This workshop will explore the poetics of forgetting and remembering, the ways in which a poem can serve as an archive of personal and political hauntings and history.

In this workshop with poet and author Sara Saleh, we’ll look at contexts of intergenerational trauma and healing as inheritance, and the way in which both pain and survivorship can sharpen our senses and open/close us to certain detail. In this workshop we will explore the stark and different ways poets move through the surreal and mundane to explore memory and loss. We will collectively deconstruct and construct language, literary technique, and spatial and temporal form, to show the shifting, spectral nature of memory. Finally, participants will write to prompts where the poem, and the self, is scattered, gathered and regathered – in tangible and unexpected ways.

Sara M Saleh is a human rights lawyer, community organiser, writer, and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon, living on Gadigal land. Her poems and short stories have been published in English and Arabic in various national and international outlets and anthologies, and she is co-editor of the groundbreaking 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity. Sara is the first poet to win both the Australian Book Review’s 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2020. Coming out soon is her debut novel, Songs for the Dead and the Living (Affirm Press 2023) and a full-length poetry collection, The Flirtation of Girls (UQP 2023).