The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process

No Elegies

101 Dana Levin No Elegies NO ELEGIES declares the upper right-hand corner, underlined twice and just to the right of a jagged lightning bolt.Midpage,the bolt splits WORM from REFUGE FIELD in a doodled throng of stars and boxes, a festival of snaking lines, then: every body // a cocoon of change—and a command banding the page-bottom: CULTIVATE THIS FIELD OF BLISS. Four phrases, black as stamps: 9/23/03. My father and then my mother had died. ~ Emotion finds its root in Latin: e—motio, to move out. It’s a given that those of us who are called to the poetic art are often following the voice of strong feeling: every poem, at its heart, an involuntary cry the poet has made into song. Listen for the gasps of outrage and ecstasy fueling Ginsberg’s Howl, the“ill-spirit sob” of Lowell’s Skunk Hour, even the round-mouthed eurekas at the core of Stevensian cool. Knicked skin, sudden win, night caress, someone dies: something happens, and it makes you open your mouth. You’re struck—you let out a sound. ~ When death has pierced you (first him and then her in the space of six months) and you deny yourself lamentation—when you deny yourself available forms of grief (you, a believer in forms)—when you refuse to memorialize, eulogize, or in any way sing before a tomb— Forms have feelings. It was the feelings offered by traditional elegy I rejected: 102 The RAg-PIckeR’S guIde To PoeTRy “Classical elegies start out with a statement of the subject (usually a specific death), followed by the lamentations or mourning of this death, and finally consolation, as the poet comes to accept the loss,” states Padgett’s Handbook of Poetic Forms. Mourning? It was a private hell, writing about it head-on unendurable . Consolation? It seemed beyond the depths of my death-shock. Acceptance ? Well, there was acceptance and then there was acceptance: NO ELEGIES I scored, with a black Staedtler pigment liner. I wanted to look that fucker death in the face. ~ Emotion: a stirring, a moving, an agitation, a perturbation, a migration; so says the OED. I refused to prop my bare grief up on the dais of the page, but still my involuntary cry demanded audience (L. audientia,to hear).Circumventing elegy meant finding new forms for the grief-cry, new lenses through which to see the human end. I began to study corpse-decay, the life cycles of diptera; became an adherent of Tibetan Buddhist teachings, which hinge on the fact of our impermanence ; meditated on psychedelic images of White Tara, Tibetan mother of compassion and long life; examined photos of sarcophagidae, the pupa of the cheese-skipper“recovered in Egyptian mummies, Mexican tomb shafts, and in the skulls of ancient bison.” I began to write poems based on research and dream, taking dictation from the worms and the gods. “Refuge Field,” “The Mentor,” and “Augur” are some of the fruits of that first refusal of elegy.“The Mentor” stems, verbatim, from a dream journal entry and preserves that initial prose form. I began to write many prose poems, and short lyrics, and long verse sequences: turning from elegy left me formally restless; in aversion I found invention. Death as muse led to poems like “Refuge Field,” where the worms and the gods met at the charnel ground: the “Eight Great Cemeteries” mentioned in the poem were prominent cemeteries of ancient India, important meditation fields for tantric adepts and monks to confront impermanence in the raw. It was, of course, not the charnel grounds of India but my back yard, with its night-crickets and cicadas, its larvae and webs, that became my devotion field. And“Augur”: it was the last to be written and is the first to appear in the book that developed from my grief conversions. Such a placement—the poem of No Elegies 103 aftermath opening the book of loss—seems right for a poem called “Augur,” named for the ancient Roman seer. I consider it a reverse elegy: its long lines spool out and reel in short, spool out again in a kind of frantic seeking, a seeking against lament. Four years after my parents died, my sister died: well and then sick and then dead in three weeks. I was sick of death, and I was sick of grief: I looked to signs...