Writing the Self-Elegy: The Past Is Not Disappearing Ink - Softcover

Kara Dorris is an assistant professor of English at Illinois College and the author of When the Body is a Guardrail and Have Ruin, Will Travel.

Contributions by: Carol Berg, Lauren Berry, Sheila Black, Bruce Bond, Kristy Bowen, John Chavez, Juliet Cook, Adam Crittenden, Jehanne Dubrow, Floydd Michael Elliott, Rigoberto González, Stephanie Heit, Kasey Jueds, Anne Kaier, Catherine Kyle, Teresa Leo, Denise Leto, Raymond Luczak, Jennifer Maritza McCauley, Kyle McCord, Rusty Morrison, Naomi Ortiz, Carl Phillips, Kevin Prufer, T.C. Tolbert, Tanaya Winder, and Jane Wong. 
 

HANDMADE INK (AN INTRODUCTION)

Today, in a time when “selfies” are popular, even leading to the invention of the “selfie stick,” it is not surprising that we would become more internally reflective while externally revealing our most personal desires. Historically, we have been trying to understand and share ourselves long before the invention of smart phones and filters—Narcissus staring at himself in water, bronze and silver-backed mirrors, artistic self-portraits by Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Kahlo, Sherman. Even the first recorded selfie, a daguerreotype taken in 1839, acts as a memorial and decorates its subject’s tombstone, American Robert Cornelius. Today, you can step into 3-D selfie machines, recreating and preserving an exact moment. An image is rarely just an image but a way of seeing, a reminder, a collection of choices and feelings that blend to create a singular experience. As long as we fear being forgotten, fear losing what we love, fear death, we will try to preserve, catalog, and share our lives. Familiar or not, this fear feels no less relevant.

Social media has made cataloging and sharing our lives even easier. When we add in the forced isolation of a global pandemic, hindsight and what-if possibilities, the fear of missing out becomes even more urgent. I wonder if we wrote notes for our pandemic selves, what would we say? Who were we before? Who will be after? That’s where the self-elegy comes in. To catalogue the good and bad, known and unknown, what could be or might never be.

For me, the self-elegy is reflective, reinventive, and confrontational, interrogating and elegizing past versions of self. To say self-elegy is new would be naive; as I read numerous elegies, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71 to Laura Kasischke’s “Space, in Chains,” I found moments of self-elegizing—for how can we truly mourn another without mourning the self created through that relationship? Yet, this awareness of self (and how the self is created) seems more prevalent than ever before. With self in the description, when the self is often considered an individualized construct, does a self-elegy have to only mourn the self or an aspect of the self to be classified as a self-elegy? And if so, why would we want to impose such a limitation?

Sometimes I think comparing contemporary self-elegies to selfies is a brilliant strategy; other times, an oversimplification or even wishful thinking—both are cultural artifacts stemming from a time of accessibility, excess, and reflection; both serve as remembrances allowing us to revisit past moments; both have the potential to promote agency, urging us to control and share our own narratives even as these same mediums shape those narratives and perceptions.

At its core, isn’t a selfie an artifact, a memorial of a moment gone too fast, a moment to remember, to celebrate, and ultimately mourn? Proof of a self already changing? A want? A wish? Then again, perhaps I am looking only as a poet looks at the world and sees an opportunity to stage, to reflect, to understand. Which leads us to primary motivations behind selfies and, arguably, behind self-elegies as well: defining and framing our own self-creation myths. The question is: are selfies isolationist narcissism or building blocks for self and community? Are we trying to present a false, superficial perfection, consciously or not, or are we genuinely trying to share our truest selves, warts and all? One prevents connection, the other welcomes it. And does it have to be one or the other? Let’s look at my story.

Can you remember your first time? My first selfie, that I remember consciously setting out to take, was standing before the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. It’s 2001, and I’m 20 years old wearing jeans, Diesel shoes, and an orange tank top. My long reddish-brown hair pulled up on a messy bun. The camera is held tight against my face, my reflection reflected in glass, superimposed over stone. I wanted proof that I existed in that particular space and time. In the picture, I am more prominent than the stone, but the stone as a translation miracle informed my need to mark the moment. Without the stone, I wouldn’t have stopped to take the picture. Without the glass case, my image wouldn’t even have been captured, which, I guess was the point: without knowing it, I was already framing my body to hide my disability. Seven years later, I wrote my first self-elegy, “Osteochondroma Lineage,” even if I didn’t know it at the time, which traced the influence my hereditary bone disorder has had on my life as a way of seeing, of understanding. By writing this poem, I was better able to understand how my bone disorder frames my experiences, past and present.

Self-elegies can allow poets to question without expectation of clear answers, to analyze the self bluntly without a coat of sugar, to be angry and melancholic at the inevitable loss time offers us. The past has a finality of death—we cannot change it—only try to understand how it influences today and tomorrow. My identity as a mourner, as one who was born to lose everything—emotionally and physically—defines me. Self-elegy allows me to define myself, create my own rehearsal space where I can dance between loss and self-reinvention—and hopefully afterwards, I will understand the world better and my place in it. I will understand that disability is not shameful and does not make us less. I am not a dancer, but the dream of being one still defines me, as does the story about a failed typing class, as well as the retelling of that story in these pages. So, yes, I mourn versions of myself that never existed or versions left behind. I mourn that wannabe dancer who never knew genetics outweigh determination. Why not just bury those dead versions of myself? I need those versions like I need my left radial bone or intestines. It’s all integral. All vital. Physical and mental skeleton and viscera. If I wrote a self-elegy to my fifteen-year-old self I would say the self is multiple and contradictory, a fickle mystery we continuously try to unravel. So what if you hold your left elbow out like an arabesque when you type? You won’t know it is wrong until someone tells you. You will lose something that day. Don’t waste every day after chasing it. Of course, she probably wouldn’t have listened, but I’m listening now. 

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