David Kennedy - Mourning After: Writing Elegies in the 21st Century
First Dream. The country is waiting for death. Everyone has become so convinced by the government of a forthcoming catastrophe, they've just given up on life. The colour goes out of their faces, paler and paler until finally white, and they walk out to meet death. For several days, the streets are crowded with people going out to find the forthcoming catastrophe and meet death. Then the city where I live is empty. I don't believe in the forthcoming catastrophe but now all the people have gone I can't find anyone who thinks the same way. So I travel to my home town. My mother, I think, is one person I can count on to take a common sense view of the situation. On the way, I hitch a lift with a team of firemen. They are testing safety equipment so that everyone will be safe in the forthcoming catastrophe. The equipment they are testing turns out to be musical instruments kept in glass-fronted boxes at the roadside in the same way that defibrillators are kept in public places like railway stations. The instruments in question are like classical lyres but bigger and bulkier and clearly electrically powered.
*
I
Question: How does one write elegies in an age when loss is the cultural dominant? I write this with the 2005 U.K. general election just over in which all parties campaigned on loss. We lose millions of pounds every day to the EU that could be spent on pensions, said the U.K. Independence Party. If you vote for the Tories, you will lose everything and return to the bad old days, said New Labour. Return New Labour to power and hard-working families will lose any chance of their just rewards, said the Tories. No wonder Charles Kennedy looked even more uncomfortable than usual announcing that the Liberal Democrats would campaign not on peoples' fears but on their hopes. Hope is the ghost at the feast of ‘desire as fear' and ‘fear as desire' at which the rest of us are permanently temporary guests. Remember: your home could be at risk if you do not keep up payments on loans secured against it.
Question: How does one find a distinctive language of public and private mourning in such an age? ‘About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position'. The opening lines of Auden's ‘Musée des Beaux Arts' could be applied equally well to the way the poets of the past wrote about death. ‘Up then Melpomene thou mournefulst muse of nyne' says Spenser's alter ego Colin Clout at the beginning of the first pastoral elegy in English poetry, the ‘November' eclogue of The Shepheardes Calendar , and goes on to offer consolation not only for death but for the ‘trustlesse state of earthly things'. Similarly, Milton 's ‘Lycidas' begins with its speaker acknowledging the unavoidability of mourning – ‘Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more' – and ends with a resolution to seek out ‘Tomorrow […] fresh woods, and pastures new'. To paraphrase Melissa Zeiger, one of the best writers on modern and postmodern elegy, elegiac writing of the past was intelligibly connected to precedents and its own intelligibility depended as much on those precedents as its own immediate topics of reference.
The intelligibility of elegy seems to have become much simpler. Douglas Dunn's widely acclaimed and prize-winning Elegies (1985) comprises thirty-nine poems commemorating his first wife Lesley who died from cancer in 1981 which use a variety of forms including sonnets, terza rima, blank verse, and free verse. Some poems deal specifically with his wife's illness and death but most are autobiographical and describe the poet's progress through mourning towards a new life. The book's diversity typifies the way that elegy in English poetry has always been, in John Hollander's phrase, a mood rather than a formal mode. Dennis Kay makes a similar point about English elegy from Spenser to Milton when he observes that elegy is simultaneously ‘a form without a form' and ‘a form without frontiers'.
At the same time, we should remember that funeral elegy has always co-existed in English poetry with a more generalised elegiac poetry. The eighteenth century pastoral poet William Shenstone wrote a range of elegies with titles such as ‘To a lady, on the language of birds' and ‘He complains how soon the pleasing novelty of life is over'. He took permission from classical writers' range of subject matter and the fact that ‘there have been few rules given us by critics concerning the structure of elegiac poetry.' He argued that elegy's ‘peculiar characteristic' is
'a tender and querulous idea…and so long as this is thoroughly sustained, admits of a variety of subjects; which by its manner of treating them, it renders its own. It throws its melancholy stole over pretty different objects; which, like the dresses at a funeral procession, gives them all a kind of solemn and uniform appearance.'
The idea of elegy as a manner continued into the Romantic period and beyond but with an important modification. Coleridge was able to remark that,
'Elegy is a form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It may treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for itself ; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet. As he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow and love become the principal themes of the elegy. Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone, or absent and future.' [Orig. emphasis]
The key phrase is ‘exclusively with reference to the poet'. Coleridge is not stressing autobiography but the authority and authenticity of individual feeling.
The preceding paragraph is perhaps a long walk to a simple fact: that a poetry of tender and querulous ideas written exclusively with reference to the poet is now the dominant mode in poetry in English. Poem after poem ends with that tender and querulous note. Here are half a dozen examples taken from The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Anthology 1989-1998 :
‘Where ragged sheets of moor are ripped by stone'
‘a bag of pearls, / that is and always will be far out to sea'
‘before heat goes out of the day'
‘the fine lines of our lips printed like the claws
of hungry birds treading lightly over snow'
‘a photograph
he was unable to stop being developed and fixed'
‘a lifetime's preparation vanished / into our waiting mouths'
To draw attention to this similarity of tone throws a habit of contemporary poetry – the negative epiphany – into sharper relief. The habit is well-known but if we try to trace its derivation then we find ourselves in relatively uncharted realms. Two answers suggest themselves. First, contemporary poetry relies on the observing and reporting ‘I'. Adrian Kear argues that ‘identity can be seen to be a melancholic structure in that, in order to maintain subjective consistency and illusory integrity, the ego has to repudiate or foreclose those identifications that enabled it to come into being'. If this is true, since the type of poem we are talking about exists to assert and go on asserting consistency and integrity, it's hardly surprising that it is so relentlessly downbeat. However, this is the merely the predictable consequence of over-reliance on the observing and reporting ‘I'. The historical contexts and causes of the personal poem are much harder to trace but more decisive. Only a few points on a possible graph can be offered here.
When Lynette Roberts wrote in the middle of the last century ‘I, rimmeled, awake before the dressing sun', she was staging a recognizably modernist ‘I'. The compressed, punning image of the toilette figures the self as masquerade and performance. Six years later, in the influential anthology New Lines , the narrating ‘I' that features in around 30% of the anthology's 74 poems is – with the notable exception of Larkin – usually a voice that only identifies itself relatively late in the poem. Indeed, the ‘I' of these poems is uncertain, even precarious. The narrator of John Holloway's ‘Journey Through The Night' appears two thirds of the way through with a careful observation of a fellow traveller who ‘wept / I thought'. Donald Davie's ‘Woodpigeons at Ratheny' is a self-reflexive account of ‘the poem I had to write' that is simultaneously ‘the poem that was denied' in which ‘I know the dove / Outsang me'. Finally, Robert Conquest's ‘Anthéor' takes nearly 50 lines to tell us ‘I find a tentative image'. Here, we might say, is a poetic ‘I', recently escaped from the roar of modernist greasepaint and the smell of the modernist crowd, stumbling around trying to find a new way of being-in-poetry.
The exact nature of this new way of being seemed clearer as the 1960s drew to a close. In 1967, we find Kathleen Raine complaining about ‘self-expression of the subjective states reflected in so much current verse' and that to understand such states readers have ‘to make ourselves smaller, like Alice , before we can get inside such mean rooms as are opened to us'. Writing four years later, Jonathan Raban identified these mean rooms with centralism. Centralism, he argued, used ‘a common, simple voice' to ‘construct a notional ‘actuality'' which paralleled the English reader's everyday ‘sociological and political environment'. Poets like John Fuller, Ian Hamilton and Hugo Williams explored ‘shared forms of experience – marriage, loneliness, the fear of death, the routine of work' and let into them ‘slippery trickles of insight and menace'. In this context, another poem by Conquest in New Lines seems highly prophetic in its evocation of ‘that strange illumination / That poets are always working to bring out / – The colour of doubt.' In his wide-ranging survey of art and culture in the 1960s, Robert Hewison argues that those in the so-called mainstream of British verse ‘felt themselves externally threatened, and domestically challenged' by the examples of Lowell and Berryman on the one hand and by the home-grown modernist underground on the other. Hewison quotes a representative centralist poet Alan Brownjohn pointing to ‘a state of demoralized inferiority' and arguing that English poetry should play to the strengths of English character and intellect: ‘reticence' and ‘reasonable utterance'. What results is an ‘I' that observes but does not intervene; and this lack of intervention in itself becomes the guarantee of an external reality about which we can all agree. Since such poetry is easy to imitate and is still well-rewarded, it is easy to see why it remains so dominant. The cycles of imitation and reward also mean that this poetry's ‘demoralized inferiority' – its original period code – has become transhistorical.
A second explanation for the dominance of the negative epiphany can be found outside poetry. The type of poetry we are taking about is inevitably marked by the cultural conditions that surround it. In ‘Melancholy and the Act', Slavoj Žižek argues that we live in the age of the rehabilitation and reassertion of melancholy. He quotes Giorgio Agamben's observation that ‘melancholia offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object.' How else to explain, for example, the growing popularity of Portuguese fado with non-Portuguese speaking audiences? In terms of the late centralist poetry whose derivation we are attempting to trace, this may mean that its superannuated period code is further bolstered by surrounding conditions. (Quite why Žižek thinks this is an age of melancholy – beyond his Lacanian theorizing – is harder to discern. His argument seems partly that Freud's privileging of mourning over melancholia has made melancholy function culturally as ‘the return of the repressed'; and partly that this return converges with the fact that, in terms of ethical acts, the fundamental human experience is not self-presence but being forever responsible to an Otherness that remains permanently withdrawn.)
Agamben's observation certainly seems to catch the tone of our six examples but we might, following Žižek, say a little more. The type of poem we are talking about simultaneously asserts consistency and integrity and recognises that it cannot unconditionally possess the object – place, event, person, perception – it is using to assert them. In fact, the only type of unconditional possession possible is loss. And, if we look at some of our examples again, things get even more complicated. Pearls that are always far out to sea, a lifetime's preparation vanishing, heat that is about to go out of the day, a photograph that can't be stopped – what all these images describe is not actually the loss of an object but the impossibility of desire. The dominant poem we are talking about mourns not lost objects but inoperative desire, desire shut down, desire aborted, desire still-born. The dominant poem mourns a lack of desire.
At the same time, there are further levels of disappointment being articulated. The mainstream poem is designed to make the impossibilities of existence consumable and tolerable by reducing them. This may, of course, in itself be something of a let-down since the impossibilities of life are usually the very things that make life worth living. However, another look at our six examples shows that they are all pointing towards or actually claiming to inhabit realms outside language. Since poetry can only possess things in language, the poet and her readers are dispossessed twice over. At the precise moment of claiming to possess the loss of desire, that loss is moved into the realm of the unattainable. It is moved to a place where, the images of being far out to sea, deserted moorland and footprints in snow that will someday melt tell us, it was located all along. And in the hopeless finality of the six endings we've looked at, it's hard not to catch a note of self-mythologizing heroism. The poet distinguishes herself by the intensity, eloquence and enthusiasm with which she embraces the lack of desire that has made the objects of that desire valueless or repulsive. Poetry, which always evokes the possibility of a transformative encounter with experience and language, is now always already nostalgic for that possibility. Poetry becomes a celebration of abjection.
To return to elegy, the form without form or frontiers, it is hardly surprising that it has lost what little distinctiveness it had. The idea that we are surrounded by loss is, of course, not a new one. Indeed, Tennyson begins In Memoriam by mocking the idea that ‘loss is common to the race' in order to move beyond conventional expressions of grief. (VI) However, another early section of the poem portrays the poet awakened by the sound of his will crying ‘Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.' In contrast, we live in an age which lacks the will to overcome loss. We are so overcome by loss that we are addicted to it. The warning slogan that comes with loans referred to earlier is merely one symptom of a culture in which we are continually invited to consume things that are, we might say, ‘pre-lost'. This is true of everything from distressed denim to organic products which allow us the simultaneous thrill of feeling the planet is almost irrevocably lost and doing our bit to pull it back from the brink. Loss has become the new sublime.
Another important factor in the loss of elegy's distinctiveness is community. One thing elegy assumes is community. In contrast, as Andrea Brady recently pointed out in a review of the US magazine Poetry , the type of poems discussed above are ‘regarded as emotional artefacts rather than as transactions in a living community of writers and readers.' More to the point, one thing elegy feeds on is paradox. In a poetic culture that is already behaving paradoxically by mourning its own lack of desire and in which any poem is an occasion to add even more to the surplus of disappointment – what we might call ‘the mourning mountain' – there is little place for a type of poetry which draws its energies from paradox. There is little place for poetry whose modus operandi derives from the following sorts of questions: how to make absence present, how to make the loss of a person into the profit of the poem, and how to refigure desire from lack. These are particular challenges for the would-be elegist; and they are particular challenges for the would-be elegist self-consciously trying to avoid the dominant poetic culture. In the second part of this essay I will try to explore that challenge by discussing my own attempts to write elegies.
*
Second Dream. I am a journalist following the story of two software developers who are in dispute with Microsoft. Microsoft's new operating system keeps rejecting their program: it runs for a while and then crashes. Now it is crunch time: a meeting with Bill Gates. The meeting takes place in large informal lounge-like area. Gates enters with a large team of executives and lawyers in dark suits. He himself is dressed in a sand-coloured, beautifully cut jacket that is either suede or linen. He is surprisingly conciliatory and immediately starts talking about how the problem can be solved, customer confidence restored etc. At which point, the two software developers interrupt him in order to present him with a gift – a musical instrument in kit form which they assemble for him. It turns out to be a weird hybrid of a classical lyre and an electric guitar. It emits a series of eerie high-pitched tones that are not particularly pleasant but strangely compelling. Gates excuses himself, gets up and leaves. After a minute, he returns, visibly angry. He produces a pump action shotgun and shoots the two software developers and myself. We are thrown backwards by the blasts. After the initial shock, I realise I am not dead. A stinging wound in my hand tells me that we have been shot with cartridges loaded with rock salt like Uma Thurman's character in Kill Bill Vol 2 .
*
II
So why am I writing elegies? April 2001 was the twentieth anniversary of my father's death and I wanted to mark the occasion with an elegy. I have published poems about my father but attempts to write a poem about the fact and meaning of his death have been unsatisfactory. I felt sure that the twentieth anniversary of his death would find me equal to the occasion but several months revisiting former attempts and attempting to write new material left me with familiar feelings of dissatisfaction and failure. The deaths of two poets – Kenneth Koch (July 2002) whom I'd known and interviewed; and Ric Caddel (March 2003) whom I'd published – again turned my thoughts to elegy; which, in turn, returned me to my failed attempts at an elegy for my father. The more I thought about it, the more I found myself struggling against the commonality of not of loss but of the ‘pre-lost'.
The struggle and subsequent reflections led to an AHRC Fellowship in the Creative & Performing Arts to explore a distinctive contemporary language of public and private mourning. The proposal for that was drafted post-September 11 th and was inevitably affected by the way that event threw into sharp relief the shifting nature of the private/public relation and changes in the public sphere. September 11 th raises important questions about responses to death in the private and public spheres and about the vocabularies of these responses. Two examples are instructive. First, in his address given at the Pentagon on the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks, President Bush spoke to the effect that loss couldn't be understood, only endured. Second, in Anne Nelson's play The Guys which deals with mourning those killed in the attacks, a character asserts that “plumbers and carpenters are needed, not intellectuals.” This implies that if writers are needed at all, it is to build – or perhaps repair - a structure. The only job of writers is, it seems, to make a house of endurance.
The President and the playwright are, in different ways, making the same point. The only response to September 11 th is ‘response' pure and simple; or, from the President's point of view, reaction leading to action. What both memorial speech and drama omit is any sense of how endurance is possible without understanding. In this context, the most striking aspect of public events commemorating the first anniversary of September 11 th was that what were apparently rituals of emotional catharsis – which might allow understanding – were over-written by the language of numb response on one hand and of reaction leading to action on the other. The rituals were rendered inoperative. In the words of Andrea Brady's recent essay on the aftermath of September 11 th ‘Grief Work in a War Economy', “Grief has supplanted political discourse, shut down academic debate, […] relieved us of historical responsibilities as it also recommenced history.” The war with Iraq again highlights the need for cultural spaces in which to do more than just respond.
These wider concerns mean that I'm no longer trying to write an elegy just for my father. Part of the Fellowship now involves writing elegies for cultural figures. One that's currently under way is a piece for Steve Lacy. I can't claim any direct personal connection here. I saw him play a few times in the 1980s. His music has always been important to me. Its seriousness and lack of sentimentality remain an important touchstone. Writing this type of elegy immediately raises questions of appropriate language. I couldn't imagine Steve Lacy or myself as shepherds – although he did of course play a species of pipe. And, anyway, a friend's story of seeing him ambling through the foyer of a very swish hotel with a bulging plastic carrier bag in one hand and an open bottle of Guinness in the other kept popping into my head and putting paid to any attempts at elevation. I started with a large worksheet and started by trying to answer the two questions: what do I know about Steve Lacy? what do I know about his music? Two things I knew about Steve Lacy were that I'd seen him play and that I had an account of a master class he'd given on Thelonius Monk to students at Scraptoft College in Leicester buried in an old notebook. I was reading Thom Gunn's Shelf Life at the time, in particular a piece called ‘Responsibilities: Contemporary Poetry and August Kleinzahler'. The piece starts by anatomising what Gunn calls ‘an obviously worthless book': Helen Vendler's Harvard Book of Contemporary Poetry . Its worthlessness largely derives, he argues, from its omission of ‘the two most important lines of tradition in contemporary poetry … the Open and the Closed.' Maybe it was because I was sitting reading that while listening to Lacy's ‘The Window' but the open and the closed seemed to say something about his music. The free improviser obsessed with bits – clangs, clinker – on the one hand; and the perpetual rediscoverer of Monk's weird contraptions on the other.
The things that I knew I knew about Steve Lacy's music started with the fact that it was very literary. It often used or responded to poetry. Lacy had referred variously to his music as ‘lit jazz' or ‘high jazz'. The use of poetry meant that he often composed sequences as opposed to distinctive single compositions. There was no ‘Giant Steps' or ‘Epistrophy' or ‘So What' in his oeuvre. The lack of distinctive single compositions also derived from the fact, more often than not, a single piece accumulated from small, seemingly disparate, units or motifs. This meant that pieces like ‘The Window' or ‘Retreat' started less like tunes and more like someone just starting to say something and then going on to try and say the same thing in as many ways as possible. If you have ever heard the shifting accents at the start of a piece called ‘Flakes' or Lacy repeating the title of ‘No Baby' before getting into it with Mal Waldron then you'll know something of what I'm talking about. And where other musicians might use these accumulations as the ‘tension' part of ‘tension-release' blowing vehicles, Lacy very rarely took flight. (‘No Baby' would be a rare exception). His playing was deliberately un musical – i.e. not sweet – and simplistic and sounded slow, almost bumbling. The deliberately unmusical aspect of Lacy's music comes across most audibly in his wife Irene Aebi's singing which you either love or hate but can't ignore. Her voice really clangs and crakes.
Once I'd started to think in this way, I started to imagine what the poem might look like, even what it might sound like. At the moment, it's still work-in-progress which you can read at the end of this article. In conclusion, when I started this project I was kind of convinced that distinctive elegy had died out because so much of the rest of poetry had become elegiac. Now I think so much of the rest of poetry is so concerned with celebrating its own gluttony for abjection, it's rendered elegy inoperative. So writing a poem that is an elegy and a celebration is way of rediscovering how to write poetry that hasn't given up on life and, more importantly, on itself. Which kind of takes us back to Auden's old masters.
*
Third Dream. Three coffins: jet black, shiny, closed. Three black coffins, large, medium, and small. Three black coffins, closed. Large, medium and small. Coming into the beach of a small bay. In that order. In desolate light. A crowd of people waiting. Many of them wearing cloaks and leggings and so conveying an impression that, despite the very modern-looking coffins, we are way back in the past, possibly even in Celtic times. A mixed feeling attached to the scene, an uncertainty about whether this is a new arrival or a return.
III
Attentions, Actualities, Reflections
i.m. Steve Lacy, 1934 – 2004
sing song with a twist
prayer in a puzzle
kids' rhyme with a frost
blues in a whistle
love song left to rust
lilt in a jostle
miaow as the gist
chirps into gospel
*
make a waltz
and flake it
take each flake
and crake it
*
a workshop
on Monk's ‘Friday the 13 th '
largely devoted to
the stutter
in the second phrase
words to the effect
how most miss it out
and miss Monk
Monk doesn't miss them
a soprano
blown into the strings
of an upright piano
listened to
intently
each note's past
a question from the future
that makes the next note's
future actual
*
music is a way
to live small figures
repeated as if
you don't know how to
but have to
music
is a way to live
as if breaths are steps
rising and falling
so time accents space
accents time
music
is an endless stair
guesses where we go
where it winds and how
as if you don't know
but have to
music
is a way but not
not that line in Proust
that says the only
good paradises
are lost ones
music
is a way to live
now repeated now
as if you don't know
as if you don't know
now now slow forward
*
A Response by Peter Middleton
Reading your essay today I found myself thoroughly enjoying its mix of forms and liking ideas such as the ‘pre-lost' (reminds me of that coinage the ‘prebuttal'). The opening dream reminded me of what is called the Crisis Forum, a network of researchers based here at Southampton University and led by Mark Levene, that is investigating global warming and the connections between different kinds of crisis, such as environmental collapse and genocide. I gave a lecture to them about eighteen months ago arguing that fictions of modern apocalypse such as Doris Lessing's Shikasta were valuable to anyone trying to campaign to halt such crises for some of the reasons implicit in your dream narrative, the way that fear is part of the means of modern state control of populations. We have had so many of these supposed imminent global catastropes over the past half century that campaigners need to approach the issues with a rich imaginative resourcefulness if they are not to oppress people. I think I agree that loss is the current cultural dominant yet would like more evidence somehow. Surely there are other dominant moods too?
I found your historically located definitions of elegy useful. The querulous is very wittily chosen since it is one of those slightly anachronistic words that seems to have no good successor, and conveys a self-deprecating yet intense state of feeling that cannot quite articulate itself. And Coleridge usefully brings in temporality. The Aldeburgh poems are so apt. The Freudian theory of identifications forming the ego through a structure of mourning is certainly pertinent and yet it seems a bit arbitrary nevertheless in your discussion, perhaps because at that point I was expecting more about the historical contexts and causes of the personal poem rather than the starting point of your assertion that contemporary poetry relies on the I. But why does it? I was much more persuaded by your clever reasoning that these poems mourn inoperative desire, though then I want to know what has shut it down, where has the desire gone. Your claim reminded me of Robert Duncan's ‘Poem beginning with a line from Pindar' where he talks about Eros growing old, and links this to the condition of modern America, though it is never quite clear if this isn't a familiar argument that might come from Reich that the repression of sexual desire ennervates a culture. You seem to use the term desire in a much broader sense. Incidentally, without the Aldeburgh poems in front of me I find the brevity of the quotations such that I can't quite perceive the fading, is it the ‘aphanisis' I mean, of desire that you detect. The line of association from Tennyson to jeans is neat.
The questions that poems ought to ask fascinate me though I stumble over them, not entirely sure I have got at what you mean. Making absence present is what we think of representation doing. What is profit in the field of the poem? Isn't it obvious that desire is premissed on lack?
I really like the emphasis on the elegist's self-questioning, and the large puzzle of how to write an elegy in a society that conducts politics through grief. The Microsoft dream is especially resonant, open-ended though obviously in part about the difficulty of melding classical and contemporary traditions in art when reason thinks that all is needed is a rational dialogue. And the need for the blast, the shock, that turns out to be the savour, the saltiness in it.
Interesting as the Steve Lacy section is there seems something missing from it, which might be reflections on what your emotional investment is, and why you believe the world needs an elegy for him, what sort of community needs to do what sort of emotional work or imaginative memorialising? The third dream is a bit disappointing after the earlier ones. I loved parts of the Lacy poem. The snappy dance of the first section, the cool rhymes of the second, and the superiority of the knowing aesthetics of the third are all very effective. The fourth stanza seemed flat after that blast, and the final section, though interesting, and reminding me of J. H. Prynne's poem ‘The Esterhazy Court Uniform', seems not quite to be reaching whatever it is that is pushing forth.
Edited e-mail 29.01.06
Works Cited
Andrea Brady, ‘Grief Work in a War Economy', Radical Philosophy , July/August 2002, pp.7-12.
Andrea Brady, review of Poetry , The Times Literary Supplement , March 11 2005, pp.25-6.
Robert Conquest, editor, New Lines , 1 st edn., (London: Macmillan, 1957).
Robert Hewison, Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties 1960-75 (London: Methuen, 1988), pp.259-261.
John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: OUP, 1975).
Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
Adrian Kear, ‘The Body in Pieces: Performance and the Fantasy of Incorporation', in Adrian Kear and Patrick Campbell (eds) Psychoanalysis and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).
Anne Nelson, The Guys – A Play (New York: Random House, 2002).
Jonathan Raban, The Society of the Poem (London: Harrap, 1971), p.70.
Kathleen Raine, Defending Ancient Springs (Oxford: OUP, 1967), p.156.
Lynette Roberts, Gods with Stainless Ears , part IV, reprinted in Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005).
Melissa F. Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Slavoj Žižek, ‘Melancholy and the Act', Critical Inquiry (Summer 2000), pp.657-681.
The poems quoted from The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Anthology 1989-1998 are: Hilary Mellon, ‘Road Through Northern Landscape'; Herbert Lomas, ‘Sea Lady'; Andrew Grieg, from ‘A Flame in Your Heart'; Jackie Wills, ‘Counting'; Lavinia Greenlaw, ‘The Innocence of Radium'; and Rhona McAdam, ‘The Boston School of Cooking Cookbook'.
last updated July 16, 2006