The ode and the elegy are often thought—at first glance—to be separate modes of poetry that belong to different emotional experiences. Historically, the elegy is supposed to move through lamentation, to celebration, to consolation, though the last stage is—understandably—the hardest for many. There’s no disentangling the complex feelings.
Loss doesn’t mean that the complexities of love disappear when a person is gone. Sadness can still belong in a kiss. Praise can also belong to death.
My mother was alive when I started writing poems about her as though she were dead. It was the only way I could imagine writing about her all. Since she never read my poems, I was already safe.
But somehow beginning from a place that believed she was dead, the words arrived with all the suddenness and joy of a gift. But I did not write any nonfiction about her until the week between her death and her funeral. It was clear and coherent paragraphs that understood the bewildering rage, despair, relief, pain, shock, and premature acceptance that spun through me.
When I started writing essays, I didn’t know how to shape them. Much like grief itself, it felt too large and unwieldy to manage. How do you fit ghosts into paragraphs?
How do you turn your weeping into a scene? But poetry taught me so many ways to approach nonfiction, and I first returned to a common touchstone in Adrienne Rich who said for: “was part of the strategy—like asbestos gloves—that let me pick up what I couldn’t touch barehanded”. The amorphous lines in my journal needed a container, and one of the first ones I chose was the poetic form of the ghazal.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
