This poem is an erasure of existing film subtitles, returning to clichés of memory in the form of the stills. The soundtrack created in response by Edmund Hardy is partly collaged from the same sources. The two pieces can be read and played together or one after the other, as joint or separate versions of déjà vu. The failure of memory is often depicted as a failure of faithfulness. But how can one keep faith with a memory that has gone missing?
[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/last-year-hardy.mp3|titles=Last Year – Edmund Hardy]Last Year (5:03)
Amy Cutler is a writer, curator, artist, and currently a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds in the Environmental Humanities research strand. She studied for her PhD (on environmental history, historical geography, and modern British poetry) in the Social and Cultural Geography department at Royal Holloway, University of London as part of the Landscape Surgery research group, and previously received her BA and MSt in English Literature at Wadham College, Oxford. She runs
Land Diagrams, an online series of cross-disciplinary ‘twinned essays’, and recently co-edited the book
Peter Riley: Critical Essays (forthcoming) with Alex Latter for Gylphi. She is currently working on her first monograph, and planning a forest humanities conference to be based in Leeds in 2015.
http://landdiagrams.wordpress.com/
