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Karen Elizabeth Bishop and David Sherman began the Elegy Project in spring 2022. In this public poetry initiative, our small volunteer team distributes recent elegies on cardstock in public spaces for strangers. People who find these poems are free to leave them for others, take them home, or circulate them elsewhere. We think of this project as a dispersed, interactive, mobile anthology of excellent recent elegies. We believe this poetry can help people connect with one another and find language for grief in this hard season of loss.
Elegy is an ancient lyric tradition for speaking to, about, and on behalf of the dead. In these fundamental tasks that shape human worlds across generations, elegy is uniquely charged with desire and ethical power. It marks a crucial limit of poetic imagining, at the edge of mortuary practices. Over two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Catullus addressed his dead brother in lines recently re-translated by Anne Carson in her own elegiac work Nox:
Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed —
I arrive at these poor, brother, burials
so I could give you the last gift owed to death
and talk (why?) with mute ash.
Elegy is, as Catallus confirms, an urgent journey bearing uncertain offerings to address a complicated absence. An intricate reckoning with human mortality, elegy is the quintessential art of working through grief and constructing memory. It continuously explores our capacity to know absent presences, gather remains, and inhabit cultural spaces alongside the dead who were once our living. Elegy is the degree zero of poetry, an origin-point of human song and origin-song of the human.
Every modern generation must re-invent its relationship to the dead; elegy is the practice of this ongoing renewal: “dear air where you used to be, dear empty Chucks / by front door, dear whatever you are now, dear son” (Danez Smith, “summer, somewhere,” Don’t Call Us Dead, 2017). The Elegy Project seeks to gather the contemporary elegiac imagination. This poetry emerges from a recent generation of writers that has dynamically engaged elegiac traditions to mobilize hope.
Elegy Project Team
Karen Elizabeth Bishop is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is on the faculty in Spanish and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Her current research focuses on lyric theory; elegy, memorial, and the craft of commemoration; geopoetics; scale; and radical translation. Her scholarly works include The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror (SUNY, 2021) and Cartographies of Exile: A New Spatial Literacy (Routledge, 2016). Her debut collection of poetry, the deering hour, was published by Ornithopter Press in 2021. You can read more about her work here.
David Sherman is faculty in the English Department at Brandeis University. His research focuses on modernism, elegy and the politics of commemoration, public sphere theory, comedy, and literature in the criminal justice system. In a Strange Room: Modernism’s Corpses and Mortal Obligation (Oxford University Press, 2014) addresses literary responses to the modernization of mortuary practices around the turn of the twentieth century. He is currently writing a book on literary responses to secularization, The Machine Stops: Modernism, Human Fungibility, and the Critique of Secular Hope. You can find his faculty page here.
Patricio Hidalgo is a visual artist based in Sevilla, Spain. Figuras Flamencas, a retrospective of his contributions to the world of flamenco, is just out from Libros de la Herida. To learn more about his work, please visit his online abode here.