“I find joy in singing my dead to life just as often as I find ache.” (Anthony Thomas Lombardi on Elegy)
Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s tenth issue, elegy. He is a Pushcart-nominated poet, editor, organizer, activist, and educator. He is the founder and director of Word is Bond, a community-centered reading series partnered with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop that raises funds for transnational relief efforts, bail funds, and mutual aid organizations, and currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. A recipient of the Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship, his work has appeared or will soon in the Poetry Foundation’s Ours Poetica, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Dilla.
We asked three of our Issue X contributors for their personal definitions of elegy: how it’s formed, where it’s been, what it could be. Here is Anthony Thomas Lombardi’s vision of the last dropped petal—the mirror in mourning—the light still on for what was once beautiful…
When I was asked to write an essay about elegies, it almost felt like some kind of cosmic—or comic—window was opening before me. The beloveds in my writing group often joke, “it isn’t an Anthony Thomas Lombardi poem unless something dies.” & there’s truth to that joke—sometimes in very literal ways, but often in shadows that barely cut through pale light. It is true, I have been surrounded by more death than most people, & my work orbits the dead via addiction, recovery, child abuse, mental illness, suicide, survivor’s guilt, et cetera. Still, what I think goes missing in conversations about elegy is the sense of something light, even joyful, in mournful dirges. Elegies form like a bruise, tinged yellow or the shade of a dying sky before purpling to black. But in our wounds, by physiological necessity, there is also healing, & in healing, by poetic justice, there is also music.
This may all seem rather prosaic & familiar, but what I’m bending toward is the idea that risk is often spoken with a hard, cautious edge, as a thing which renders us fallible. Rarely do we hear about what waits in the darkness to trace silver around our silhouettes. Jumping headlong into the unknown, we experience anxiety about the myriad of ways we can be inured to grief. Life, trauma, love, death can all be frightening—are all frightening—but come with halos we are often too fixated footward to discern. What I’m most interested in is that by diving into precarity, we are also taking the risk of joy.
In the Mountain Goats songs “Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1” & “Spent Gladiator 2”—the former dedicated to the late singer Amy Winehouse, in whom much of my first book finds narrative structure & emotional grounding, & the latter dedicated to an unspecified fighter past his prime—John Darnielle sings the refrain “stay alive,” sometimes as a rallying cry, sometimes as a preemptive admission of defeat. My poem in Half Mystic Journal’s tenth issue, “spent gladiator #3,” acts as an imagined sequel to these songs. The ways in which Darnielle finds humanity, empathy, & compassion with an acute eye & a kinship freshly unearthed in even the most maligned & neglected among us—not just in these songs but across his oeuvre—came to mind while I watched the documentary Jaco, about the jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius. Pastorius’s life was tragically cut short when he intentionally started a fight outside a club in Wilton Manors, Florida, a habit he became accustomed to during manic episodes of bipolar, & was beaten to death. Pastorius’s bipolar symptoms were dismissed as mere eccentricities by the milieu he traveled in, & between his lack of treatment & his drug & alcohol abuse, he became houseless shortly before the incident, untreated & unwelcome by society or even his own family.
I wrote “spent gladiator #3” for Pastorius, both gutted by & drawn to his story, a month before I was admitted to Bellevue Hospital for a suicide attempt & diagnosed as bipolar myself. This poem is an elegy for Pastorius, but it is also an elegy for the boy I used to be, often derided & dismissed as a liar when exhibiting symptoms of multiple illnesses. Elegies aren’t solely written as requiems while someone, something, feels the soil falling over their head. Elegies are also tender pleas to, as Darnielle sings it, stay alive—to keep those parts of us, however maimed, not only unforgotten, but resurrected with the love & acknowledgement they lacked in sentient life. In this life. In your life. In our life.
In the poem “A Curse Against Elegies,” Anne Sexton writes:
I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing.
But you—you go ahead,
go on, go on back down
into the graveyard,
lie down where you think their faces are;
talk back to your old bad dreams.
Given the title, it would be easy to read this as an actual admonishment against elegies; but given the overarching narrative of Sexton’s work, I like to read it as an admonishment to herself for keeping her nose in the dirt. Ironically, this, too, is a form of elegy—in dialoguing with our past selves, even our present selves or our future selves, we are not carving out exits but kicking down the walls that keep us dead to our own consciousness. I don’t believe “stay alive” & the Sexton stanza are negating or mutually exclusive. I believe they shout, scream, whisper, seethe from different points in the same orbit. I also happen to have both tattooed on my body, maybe as a reminder of how elegies transcend not only the binary but flesh on Earth. Elegy can be messy. Elegy is sometimes unhappy with itself, too. Elegy is regrinding the lens again & again & again. Elegy is a reconstruction of joy.
It is important, I think, to make space not just for our joy but for our grief. They not only traverse the same trails, they cannot exist without each other. I’ve spent my life writing & rewriting elegies, for beloveds, for martyrs, for myself past & present, for the chronic diseases inside me that actively want me dead daily. I find joy in singing my dead to life just as often as I find ache. In this space that I create, they co-exist, even coalesce. A few weeks ago, my love & I walked the beach of Coney Island at sunrise, the horizon bleeding flush pink & lavender onto the sparkling sand. We found a dead horseshoe crab propped up & partially immersed in the wet earth. Sometimes, the universe has already written the elegy you’re trying to write. But don’t let that stop you. After examining the crab for several minutes, we continued walking & found another one. & another one. & another.
Anthony Thomas Lombardi’s “spent gladiator #3,” along with twenty other pieces by contributors and two columns by the Half Mystic team, are compiled in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue X: Elegy, a constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, and prose dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. Issue X is a prayer against forgetting, a promise to bear witness even where music falls short. And when the time comes to let go of what it can’t live without, the elegy issue knows what it means to wake into memory. It knows that in a world touched by song, there exists no such thing as extinction. It is available for preorder now.