Temporary Graves

The poet can offer nothing to his brother’s memory but his words. This is the impossibility of mourning, which makes Catullus's poem 101, a fraternal elegy, possible. The framework of the fraternal elegy encourages readings that recognize the complexities of recognition and relation, particularly among the variously marginalized, who are amplified, thereby amplifying the individual, within the lyric space. Within the burgeoning field of Collective Memory Studies, the elegiac poem, or poetry of mourning, has suffered disregard within the literature, be it for its obviousness as a site of cultural memory activity or for the challenge it poses as a genre to critical inquiry. In Temporary Graves, fraternal elegy emerges from the map Catullus draws in poem 101 to establish works of elegiac poetry as simultaneously products and activators of collective memory. In an effort to articulate the importance of contemporary elegy in understanding the movements and manifestations of cultural memory, this project applies methodologies from memory studies, bibliography, and deconstruction to four collections of contemporary poetry written and published in the United States: Matt Rassmusen’s Black Aperture (2013), Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (2020), Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of (2018), and Anne Carson’s Nox (2010). By considering a constellation of materials within and beyond these collections themselves—such as photography, film, modern art, architecture, zines, and archival miscellania—Temporary Graves posits an approach to contemporary elegiac poetry grounded in the material and the labor of the modern, global literary production landscape.