"Grief does not exist only in subtraction." (Geoff Anderson on Elegy)
Geoff Anderson is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s tenth issue, elegy. He is a Callaloo fellow; his most recent digital chapbook, A Bigger Hourglass, was released with Ghost City Press. He has work in Nimrod, The Journal, Tar River, and www.andersongeoff.com.
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 Geoff Anderson’s vision of the last dropped petal—the mirror in mourning—the light still on for what was once beautiful…
Before sitting down to write this, I had to find an audio transcript to use with one of my translation students. The selection I stumbled on: a talk on Kierkegaard, where the speaker explains that when we lose something, we lose ourselves—not just a part, but the entire self.
My grandmother is the first person in my life to pass away at a time when I am old enough to understand the permanence of death. Grief is a process of adaptation, painful both in the loss of a relationship and in the donning of an identity we did not ask for. Had I the choice, I would always say I am a grandson; my grandmother lives here. But it’s not that simple.
Were this to happen once, like a single twitch of a minute hand, I imagine the process would be more bearable. But the clock keeps ticking. In the newspaper I read an obituary for the kid I played ball with years ago. My cat Tilly succumbs to a growth in her throat. I shed one self. I shed the next.
As I shift, the world shifts. My family knows me differently now, as do friends and neighbors when they learn the news. I am the boy who has lost a grandmother. It becomes easy to center the story on my own pain. Harder to remember there are reverberations beyond me: my father is now a man without a mother.
Talk like this is misleading, though; grief does not exist only in subtraction. There is, too, the creation of a new identity, albeit one that on the outside looks strikingly similar. Elegy is birthed from such discomfort, a speaker navigating a world that hurts precisely because of its horrible resemblance to the one left behind.
In this sense, every poem is an elegy. The speaker loses something by the end of the piece and so they are transformed, not the same person in the final line as in the first. The same applies to poets: a poem is truly finished only when it surprises the writer. The revelation that a poem uncovers need not be large. I know that writing about fatherhood has allowed me great and small insights into how I was fathered. Suddenly, I contemplate the constant tiny choices that my father must have made with three-year-old me, from when to let me leave my half-full dinner plate to whether my bedroom was warm enough to sleep in a t-shirt. These realizations, even when joyful, hold an undertone of grief.
I wrote “New Year’s Eve,” my poem in Issue X: Elegy, with the interplay of loss and life in mind. The setting felt natural, one year giving way to the next, neither entirely independent from the other. My neighbor had recently lost his mother and brother to COVID-19. He had also just welcomed a pit bull puppy into his house, who would bound across our yards and roll around until grass clippings covered his fur.
The elegy is the death. The elegy is the puppy. The elegy is a bouquet of begonias, a gift of dog bones in the mailbox. The elegy is the neighbor, at once grieving and welcoming new life—new joy. The elegy is the speaker, deciding to celebrate or to mourn. But nonetheless, to turn, to shift, become again in the wake of emptiness.
Geoff Anderson’s “New Year’s Eve,” 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.