Reimagining the Elegy with Denise Saul

Cath Drake is running an online poetry writing workshop led by Denise Saul.

Exploring the the poetic form of the elegy, this workshop will explore the ways in which contemporary elegiac poetry maps absence through fragmentation, erasure, and other destabilising techniques. The workshop will also examine how poets challenge the idea that the elegy must offer consolation or closure, instead engaging with loss as ongoing, unresolved, and complex.

Participants will reflect on the elegy as a space that inhabits loss rather than resolves it, engaging with poetry as an imaginative attempt to negotiate absence. Through discussion, and close reading, the workshop invites participants to experiment with techniques that destabilise how poetry performs on the page and reimagine what an elegy can be.

Hosted on Cath Drake’s ‘The Verandah’.