week 9: Whatever is Lost is Worshipped

some lecture transcripts about poetry of the third space

I’m teaching this semester, a poetry class within an anthro department, looking at writers and writing that work in different “Englishes” shaped by their intersecting identities. Each week, we read a packet of poems and essays, and I deliver a short lecture at the beginning of class. And I’m sharing those lectures here! This one was from April 8th. The packet included an excerpt from Mahmoud Darwish’s “In the Presence of Absence” and the poems “Zewdit” by Aracelis Girmay, “Backwards” by Warsan Shire, “Upon Reading that Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds” by John Murillo, and “Armadillo” by Hala Alyan.

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from D.A. Powell's chapter on the elegiac structure in Michael Theune's "Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns"

Whatever is Lost is Worshipped

April 8, 2025

The poem Backwards by Warsan Shire calls to mind, for me, Darwish’s “I came but did not arrive, I came but did not return.” A palindrome, the poem both opens and closes with the line “The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room.” At the start of the poem, the line is followed shortly after by “that’s how we bring dad back” and at the end of the poem, shortly preceded by it. The hypothetical is key here—“the poem can start,” not the poem does start. So, in a way, this mythic poem that is “how we bring dad back” never actually does start, and is only ever imagined. Its palindrome form, where the first stanza’s fifteen lines are flipped and reversed in the second stanza, creates an endless loop of this hypothetical poem that can start but never does start, and at the halfway point actually starts moving in reverse, moving backwards, away from the imagined point of arrival. The word can repeats throughout the poem to continue the construction of this hypothetical world: “I can make the blood run back up my nose” “I can make us loved” “I can write the poem” — can, somewhere, someday, in an imagined future tense. Near the end of the first stanza, the hypothetical “can” solidifies into a statement of intent with “I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love.” Not I do rewrite this whole life, not I am rewriting this whole life, but I will—somewhere, someday, but not here, not in this poem, not in this lifetime.

To me, that is at the root of the heartbreak of the poem—a speaker constructing a hypothetical dream world where what is lost is returned, blood returns to the body, the bone returns to its socket, the father takes off his jacket and returns to his chair. But what is lost does not return, and that is why, as Darwish writes in In the Presence of Absence, “whatever is lost is worshipped.” This is echoed in John Murillo’s “Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds” with the line “and like any good god, I disappeared.” The absent as divine, inviting worship.

In Aracelis Girmay’s poem Zewdit, the absent figure shapes the entire world around its negative space, around the space left behind: “Everything / is the absence of her.” Instead of depicting the “people who walk / through the house,” the poem instead depicts the empty space between them: “she is not here, / not any of the people who walk // through the house.” We travel with the speaker through a world full of Zewdit’s absence, colored by it: “I never met her on a train or at the hotel / in Frankfurt, on a layover, she was not one of the women there.” But as the poem continues with this delineation of the negative space, something fascinating begins to happen: the absence begins to cast what is present into sharp relief. Zewdit is not “any of the people who walk / through the house” but the house is full of people; she is not one of the women at the hotel in Frankfurt, but those women surround the speaker, kissing her cheeks and taking her for tea and accompanying her to the airport the next day. And toward the end of the poem, “if she stands with the deer, […] / all I see are the deer”—it is the search for Zewdit which leads the speaker to see the deer, the absence of Zewdit that makes the deer all the more visible. Negative space, much like in a photograph, has an underscoring effect, drawing the eye and the attention to what is there in the absence of what is not.

When Mahmoud Darwish writes “my homeland is not a suitcase,” despite the word “not,” our attention is drawn to the suitcase, wondering if it could contain a homeland, could become one. I think here again of Aracelis’s speaker saying “Everything / is the absence of her.” So at first, the homeland is, in this depiction, characterized by the absence of the suitcase. And then the suitcase is characteristic of the absence of the homeland. The loss calls attention to what is left: the homeland is gone, “my homeland is a suitcase,”—in order to not be lost forever, the homeland must transform, must find a new form through which to exist; in this case, the suitcase. Zewdit is gone, but is not lost forever, because her absence transforms to the emphasizing space around the remaining people in the house, the remaining women at the airport, the deer outside the window. If Zewdit were truly gone, everything would simply be itself, instead of everything being “the absence of her.” This haunting is a presence, is a continuation of presence, is a transformed presence that endures, paradoxically, as absence. All summed up so clearly in Darwish’s title: the presence of absence. Not, I might point out, the absence of presence. The craft is in that choice of phrasing. “Words are a homeland!” he writes, and I think also of Adorno’s “for a man without a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.”

What groups the readings in this week’s packet is that they are all, in some form, elegies, one of the oldest kinds of poem, whose name comes from the ancient Greek for “funeral lament.” One of the most ancient literary impulses is that of wielding language in the face of loss. In the 7th-century Arabian peninsula there existed a tradition which assigned women poets the role of writing elegies for the dead, to be performed in oral poetry competitions (some of history’s first poetry slams), where the legendary poet al-Khansa first came to renown.

And two of the four poems in this packet—Eric Dolphy and Zewdit—are in couplets, a form historically associated with the elegy, with the two lines of the couplet traditionally meant to mimic the rising and falling action of the elegy: rising in the first line, falling in the second. The cycle of life and death, or death and resurrection, Fall and Spring, absence and immortality. Presence and absence, cycling through for the duration of the poem. Writes D.A. Powell in Structure & Surprise: “The elegy can succeed in salvaging victory from death by giving immortality to the object of mourning.” Or in salvaging victory from absence by giving presence to the object of mourning, reconstructing it in language, a sturdier container than the fallible, mortal human body, or the fallible, mortal country. All four of the poems also mimic the titular funeral parade of the elegiac form, both in their longer length and in the way they employ lists—unfurling lines of images and people marching down the page, invoking the natural world and its sparrows and swans and armadillos and deer and cats, mothers and fathers and siblings and aunts, the women at the airport in Frankfurt, the children. The whole world participating in this act of mourning, in commemorating these losses. Here is another convention of the elegy: its polyvocality, the way it folds everyone and everything into the act of grief.

“Talking against death,” Powell goes on to say, “the poem continues—as a living entity—to inhabit the space once occupied by the beloved.” Again, think of Darwish’s “Words are a homeland!” and Adorno’s “writing becomes a place to live.” Language can be plugged in to fill the space left behind by what is lost, by what is gone, to keep that space from closing up, from disappearing. Of the empty space between the speaker’s parents, Hala Alyan writes in Armadillo: “this whole goddamn world the inch between their shoulders in the front seat.”

What is lost is immortal; the dead die only once, but can be remembered forever. Like Zewdit’s absent body immortalizing her into everything that remains: “Everything / is the absence of her.” Writes Edmund Spenser in the elegiac poem Astrophel: “can so divine a thing be dead? / Ah no, it is not dead, ne can it die.” D.A. Powell describes this immortality as the elegized beloved existing continually in “the paradise of remembering.” The language echoes Darwish, who says “What is lost grows in you and in the sunset, which grants what is distant the attributes of paradise and purges it of any defect.” Always borrowing from the language and imagery of religion, because living is for mortals, a little blip in history’s long line, and everything else, everything around it and after it, belongs to the realm of the divine.

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I’ll keep these un-paywalled for the first week after posting! Next week’s unit is called Nowhere to Go Back To.

xoxo

S