"Pattern Mapping A Life: The Convergence of Form and Fragmentary Memory," the Gertrude Mann Lecture by Airea D. Matthews

“Whoever managed to survive must have the strength to remember.”
-Aleksandr Herzen, “Western European Arabesques I, The Dream,” My Past and Thoughts

Most of memory is an abbreviated echo of reality. Writers are left with fragmentary memories that must serve to illumine some truth of their lives or the truth of life itself. Form enters as a critical craft device in the proper delivery of memory’s disordered parcels. In this talk, based on the poems in Bread and Circus, we will explore the importance of form and pattern mapping in creating a cogent personal narrative from disparate intertextual sources and shared remembrances.

Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus, a memoir-in-verse that combines poetry, prose, and imagery to explore the realities of economic necessity, marginal poverty, and commodification, through a personal lens. Matthews received a 2020 Pew Fellowship, a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Matthews earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. From 2022-2023 she served as Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College where she directs the poetry program.

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