“How far can/will the elegy stretch?” Amy Gerstler asked our workshop participants this July. “Are there limits to what conventional or unconventional elegy can mourn, memorialize, honor, metabolize, question? Are there angry, comic, upbeat and/or love elegies? How about some stealth elegies?”
In her quest to find out, Gerstler examined poems from Terrance Hayes, Li Young Lee, John Berryman, Anne Carson, as well as considered the wealth of the possibilities for various elegiac incorporations in our own work.
Recorded in the Reed Chapel during the 2015 Summer Workshop, we give you Amy Gerstler’s lecture on the uses of the elegiac.