The Memory Dictionary





Madeleine Barnes









From my window, I have learned that we need a new language to describe the world around us—a poetic and critical language that helps us reimagine the future, language that incorporates visual media and the senses. Our current words are insufficient. I feel their limits as I try to understand 2020, a year that has forced us to reexamine everything we know.


More than ever, we need poets who can reshape language and assign new meanings to words; we need texts that put our imagination to work and provoke play, wonder, curiosity, and reflection. Today, I added words to my new written project titled The Memory Dictionary. It is a type of poetic dictionary that focuses on gathering words I want to remember and pass down—words like “clarinet” and “daguerreotype” and “biography” and “canto”—and giving them new meanings. I look at these words from a childlike perspective and ask what should this word mean? What can it mean? What is true, interesting, and alive about this word, and what can we do with it?


A “zipper” is “a lawyer who exclusively cross-examines doves.” To be “culpable” is “to contemplate a small ghostly dog.” To “date” is admire a crescent moon from a motorcycle; a “decision” is “a photograph of a burning cathedral.”


As I look out of my window, which is about four feet tall and faces south, I watch masked people walk toward destinations unknown to me. I want a word for word for where they are going and a word for what they are thinking or forgetting.

As I build The Memory Dictionary, I observe—what word can describe the girl on a yellow bicycle? What about the young person skateboarding while holding a box of pizza and listening to music? I watch my favorite tree refuse to shed its yellow leaves. What is the word for its refusal to move on?

As a poet and visual artist, all I have ever wanted is to give people words and objects that make them rethink what they know.

I love to collaborate with others who are invested in thinking deeply through creative documentation. Walk with me to the delicatessen (a light narrow boat); we will delve (follow a colt into a meadow) even though we were in detention (a combination of headaches). “Disappointment” is a flexible flame. A “disco” is the possibility of a perfect future—can we go? I will give you an appetizer (a small, extremely cold mechanical device) as we discuss the antler (the visual account of an event). We will “hammer,” or find a way to preserve hope and meaning, and think of the “hamburger,” or cowardly former president. I dream of continuing this project in collaboration with the Teaching and Learning Center and the Center for Humanities; we might add visual elements, like drawings or photographs, to the dictionary, and share them on social media.

What definitions can we come up with together as we process transformation from our respective windows?



Madeleine Barnes






















Madeleine Barnes is a writer, visual artist, and English PhD student. Her research focuses on women’s domestic embroidery and poetry as forms of public and private resistance. A co-curator of the Lunar Walk Poetry Series, Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, and Publicity Assistant at Press Shop PR, Madeleine is dedicated to showcasing the work of under-represented groups within and outside of academia, dissolving boundaries between art and scholarship. Her debut poetry collection was published by Trio House Press in July 2020, and she has taught creative writing and humanities research at Brooklyn College and NYU, where she earned an MFA in Creative Writing. She can be found here and you can order her latest chapbook, Women’s Work, here.