Immemorial

Immemorial is a visual and poetic meditation on the form, signification, and history of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as well as the history of the conflict in Vietnam and its cultural aftershocks for both nations. The title “Immemorial” suggests the homophonic phrase, “in memoriam,” but also the ways that grave personal and national losses transcend temporal bounds: such losses descend from and last beyond time immemorial. These poems contemplate the Wall’s disruption of our experience of time and place, and the ways in which it materializes and renders touchable the otherwise absent, liminal space between the living and the dead, the reader and the names.

An excerpt from Immemorial appears in interim 35.3