Elegy as Continuance with Allisa Cherry

We often teach the elegy as a backward-looking archive, a room where we speak about the dead as a gone thing. But if grief is another expression of love, might there be an argument for the elegy as a love poem?

     This workshop will be a departure from the idea that grief requires we speak across a distance of time or through a closed door. Instead, we will treat the elegy as an ongoing conversation that refuses to relegate the beloved to the status of memory.

     Our focus will center on the direct address, employing the power of the second person (“you”) to collapse the space between the speaker and the subject.

     By studying the works of poets like Lucille Clifton, Jay Hopler, and Dorothea Lasky, we will examine how poets summon what has departed into the immediate, present world.

     Through generative…