If Claudia Rankine is right that “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” how do you write a poem that does justice to the ongoingness of that condition, the changing same of Black grief and death, from the Middle Passage to Black Lives Matter? [1] Rankine’s celebrated mixed-media, didactic Citizen: An American Lyric, which includes elegiac prose poems for Trayvon Martin, James Craig Anderson, and others, represents one way to meet the challenge. [2] For another Black American poet who...

I was talking last summer with a friend about the mass losses occurring across the globe, and she asked me whether I found it odd that there were no memorials to those lost to the Covid pandemic, nor forms of yearly remembrance in the United States. I was embarrassed to realize that I had not thought about that lack—I was so focused on the return to normalcy from Covid and the other cataclysmic events in the world that my amnesia mirrored that of the culture around me. There are no monuments to...

In February 2023, Lagos-based critic Oris Aigbokhaevbolo launched a new online literary magazine, Efiko, with a piece entitled “The Death of Nigerian Literature,” in which he indicted the hollowing out of Nigeria-based literary platforms and flight of writers to creative writing programs abroad. [1] The next month, a young poet-critic whose Substack moniker is Eliot of Lagos asked whether contemporary Nigerian poetry was really “Nigerian” rather than American. He claimed that alongside...

After years of teaching and writing about elegy I’ve concluded that this is work in which the intellectual and the personal are deeply intertwined. Many of the colleagues with whom I collaborated on Modernism and Mourning (2007) were motivated in their work, as was I, by their own experiences with grief. Many of my students have told me about the solace they have found in the elegiac poems and memoirs we’ve studied. When preparing to present a literary studies perspective at an interdisciplinary conference on “Death and Dying” in 2018, I sought to widen my understanding of mourning by studying the manuals consulted by bereavement therapists. Those clinical accounts of grief taught me not to overestimate the utility of poetic elegies. At the same time, they seemed impoverished, lac

Writing about genre tends to require broad definitions and big claims. Without them, you can expect readers and interlocutors to ask, with barely veiled frustration, “But what makes this poem an elegy?” Especially if the poem is not about the death of a loved one. Or not about death at all. I get this question a lot. And I should begin by confessing something. Writing about elegy in a scholarly mode feels strange to me. Strange because I probably will not finish the book on political elegy that...

Here, I propose that the cross-out ( like so), in its simultaneous attempt to erase and preserve a word, models a form of elegy that does justice to the traumatic past while enabling narrative progression. It is a mode of repair rather than despair. Virginia Woolf, with her penchant for the cross-out, sets an example for two contemporary elegists: poet-essayist Anne Carson and novelist-critic Namwali Serpell. All three look to the cross-out as an alternative to conventionally male forms of elegy...

Clothing and costume are among Denise Riley’s key metaphors, from the white ballet skirt and headdress of her “Liberty Belle” to the synthetic fabrics of poems like “Shantung”, “Rayon” and “Lurex.” [1] Riley’s sartorial metaphors are key to understanding the restless role-playing of Riley’s lyric “I”. Exploring the motif of “trying on” in Riley’s poems, I consider in particular how her sequence “A Part Song” performs a sort of elegiac fancy dress, “do[ing] the bereaved in different voices” and...

– Oh so so white, what you haven ’t seen still blinds you. From one white to another, sometimes tearing through, this blinding white surrounds you. It has a soft, buttery consistency, with a lumpy texture. What do you think it is? – Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it! – Do you? – I ’m sweating in the sun, it ’s melting my tights ’ wax. – Look, you ’ve made such a splash, you ’re drowning off the coast somewhere, so so unnoticed, and so so white. – I ’d don ’t mind, but please tell me, how much will this cost me?