Hear Me and Have Pity": Rewriting Elegy in the Poetry of Paula Meehan (original) (raw)
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ANNE FOGARTY “ Hear Me and Have Pity ” : Rewriting Elegy in the Poetry of
2009
haunting and evocative force. They abound in banished but revivified presences and in images of loss, failed communication or misapprehension, and death. Meehan’s artistry routinely takes the form of elegy and carries out acts of mourning, both public and private. Although this has been a feature of her work from its inception, it has become a dominant aspect of her most recent collection, Painting Rain, which prominently assembles many different elegies and marks the passing, not just of family members and friends, but also of aspects of the Irish natural environment and of quotidian existence. It is the burden of this essay that the elegiac is a crucial dimension of Meehan’s aesthetic and that it forms a fundamental underlay of herwork. As elegist, Meehan fulfills the quest of the lyricist to give contour to subjective reality and to articulate intimacy. But she also assumes a more impersonal and urgent role as an expressive commentator on, and visionary hierophant for, communal e...
Poetry of Lost Loss: a Study of the Modern Anti-Consolatory Elegy
2011
This dissertation analyzes the absence of consolation in modern elegies through the phenomenon of “lost loss”: a feeling that a specific loss is either absent, ineffectual, or itself lost, or has become a stand-in or screen for something else. Poetry of lost loss simulates a mood more aptly described as one of a subdued, causeless, chronic “dysthymia”: when the loss is itself lost and is felt only as a dysthymic trace, the notion of mourning becomes obsolete, since there is nothing left to be mourned for except a faint echo of undefined dispossession. To investigate the origin of this obsolescence, Chapter 1 studies how William Wordsworth’s later poems and Essays upon Epitaphs regard elegies as necessary fictions. Chapter 2 hypothesizes that Wallace Stevens’s creation of the fictive “mythology” in his allegorical elegies unveils the loss of loss, and suggests that the function of elegy is less to mourn and console than to attempt to locate an unplaced feeling of equivocal loss through its exploratory utterances. Using these core concepts—how the loss of loss leads to a creation of a fictive, makeshift expressive medium similar to what Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok call a “phantom” in The Shell and the Kernel—Chapter 3 surveys various forms of lost loss in Theodore Roethke’s generic elegies, John Berryman’s Dream Songs, and Sylvia Plath’s poems of 1963. Chapter 4 reads Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III as a case of an anxiety over the prospect of lost loss. In conclusion, the dissertation observes that, in the dysthymia of lost loss, a loss would be left unrecognized until the elegy constructs the fact of the loss and adds a linguistic shape to it. To capture such elusive traces of privation, elegists create phantoms—like Stevens’s sarcophagus allegory or Roethke’s imaginary Aunt Tilly—to forge figurations for vague dejections. In the dismal catastrophe of reality, one finds a way to live in the world of imagination: the poetic forgery of loss is a product of this dysthymic lost loss.
This paper explores the ways in which poetic language might enact and facilitate the fundamental human experience of mourning, where mourning is understood theoretically to encompass the subject's always bi-directional relationship to loss. This concept of mourning as a process involving a concomitant acknowledgement of absence and an ongoing introjection of the lost object, is here considered through the particular focus of two poems which deal with the loss of the mother. The rupture of this dyadic relationship of mother and daughter is read as emblematic of the primary tearing upon which subjectivity is predicated. Through a focused literary critical analysis, involving both close reading of poems and a theorisation of the nature of a broader poetic language, and informed by a psychoanalytic framework, this paper describes mourning as a form of poesis and the poem itself as an ethical process by which to grapple with the rich interplay of loss and possibility, speech and silence. Keywords: Mourning, Poetry, Gender
2018
Due to humanity’s proclivity to mourn their dead, it is only natural that poetry of grief, such as elegy, proved to be one of the most resilient modes of poetic expression. During its long history, elegy has undergone numerous modifications, reflecting changes in both society and poetry. As it is more and more difficult to find solace either in nature or religion, contemporary elegists struggle with the expression of grief, often turning to irony or humour. Gender, too, plays an important role in the construction of mourning poetry, with the masculine elegy focusing on poetic competition and emotional substitution, and the feminine elegy relying upon connection and the process of recuperation instead. The paper analyses “Missing You”, a long poem from Penelope Shuttle’s collection Redgrove’s Wife (2006), investigating its status as a contemporary feminine elegy.
Poetry, drama and the novel present readers and viewers with emotionally significant situations that they often experience as moving, and their being so moved is one of the principal motivations for engaging with fictions. If emotions are considered as action-prompting beliefs about the environment, the appetite for sad or frightening drama and literature is difficult to explain, insofar nothing tragic or frightening is actually happening to the reader, and people do not normally enjoy being sad or frightened. The paper argues that the somewhat limited and problematic epistemological framework for dealing with the question of fiction-induced emotions has been enhanced by a better empirical understanding of the role of the emotions in social animals and in our individual hedonic economies, as well as by a more generous philosophical assessment of what counts as 'real'. Literary works can be understood further as monuments to experiences of loss that memorialize the highly pleasurable attachments associated with them. The term 'poet' in the title of this article refers to the literary artist in general, following the usual translation of the term in Freud's essay, 'The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming'. 1 Its subject matter is the 'Anna Karenina problem', the 'paradox of car-ing', which has a double aspect. 2 First, the mode of generation and ontological status of literature-generated emotions remains contentious; there is no general agreement on whether we can actually care about things that never happened and people who never existed. Second, the pleasurable nature of the aesthetic experiences of grief, fear, anxiety, and other negative emotions remains puzzling, in the absence of better elucidation of the psychological mechanisms allegedly at work in catharsis or aesthetic distancing. Grief has meanwhile been undertheorized by philosophers. This is understandable. To the philosopher, the salient phenomena are attachment, the building and maintenance of social bonds, and cooperative activities. Moral and political philosophy have much to say about care, community, responsibility to others, and related topics. Neglect, secession, and aban-donment attract less attention, for it is hard to talk about that which is not. Yet we recognize that emotional life consists of cycles of attachment and loss and that their evolutionary roots are deep and wide. 3 Friends drift away or move away, and we replace them with new friends; the children whose needs structured our lives grow up and move out so as to have children of their own; we tear up the hearts of others and get our own torn up too. Ordinary conversation testifies to the centrality of these attachments and losses in people's lives.
Perimeters of Grief": Elegy in and out of Bounds in Fred D'Aguiar's Memorial Poetry
Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 2021
While Fred D’Aguiar’s preoccupation with acknowledging the dead and honoring their memory gives his work an idiosyncratic elegiac quality, it is with the publication of the poetic sequence “Elegies”, from the collection Continental Shelf (2009), that the author overtly pitches himself in the traditional terrain of the elegy as a poetic genre. This sequence, a response to the Virginia Tech shootings (April 16, 2007), the deadliest gun rampage in US history to date, invites critical attention not only because it remains critically unexamined, but also because through its title it presents itself as an elegy when an anti-elegiac turn has been identified in modern poetry. This paper will explore D’Aguiar’s intervention in the debate surrounding elegy’s contemporary function as a genre which oscillates between the poles of melancholia and consolation, thus contributing to shaping the contours of an ancient but conflicted poetic form for the 21st century. I will be arguing that D’Aguiar’s...
The Poetics and Politics of Mourning
eSocial Sciences, 2020
In the age of publicized mourning and the appropriation of death for grand and often seedy spectacles, the interest in ways of dying has found repeated sparking points. Yet we see how some deaths find no resonance, almost as though there is no need to mourn them, being disposable lives and ungrievable deaths.
Textual Practice Mourning the elegy: Robert Creeley's 'Mother's Photograph'
Textual Practice, 2017
Although Robert Creeley is rarely considered an elegiac poet, he investigated problems of time and closure in elegiac writing earlier in his career than most critics have acknowledged, and by means unexplored by contemporary elegists like Allen Ginsburg and Sylvia Plath. Like Roland Barthes’ La chambre claire (1980), Robert Creeley’s 1986 poem ‘Mother’s Photograph’ incorporates and interrogates an alternative technology of representation to resolve a crisis in the work of maternal mourning. The last in a series of elegies written over the course of 14 years, ‘Mother’s Photograph’ suggests that Creeley, like Barthes, experienced the ‘sporadic’ temporality of grief and the surprising ‘violence’ attached to the photograph’s elegiac use. While the series as a whole sheds light on the trajectory of Creeley’s work and suggests a significant revision to existing accounts of elegy in mid-century literary history, the final poem speaks to issues of poetics engaged when a volatile genre, the elegy, is forced to account for the wordless revelations of an aesthetic object imbued with the aura of death. As it reflects on the series’ gradual withdrawal from conventional elegy and its consolations, ‘Mother’s Photograph’ turns toward the work of mourning elegy itself.