Reimagining the Elegy with Denise Saul, 30/3/26

The elegy can be understood as an imaginative resurrection, a poetic machinery that seeks to bring back what has been lost, while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of full recovery.

While the form has long been associated with mourning and absence, it resists being confined to a single emotional trajectory. We will consider the elegy as a space that both inhabits loss and attempts to negotiate with it.

Moving beyond traditional ideas of consolation and closure, we will examine how contemporary poets challenge the elegiac mode through formal experimentation.

We will explore how contemporary elegiac poetry maps absence through fragmentation, erasure, and other destabilising techniques. The workshop will examine how poets challenge the idea that the elegy must offer consolation or closure, instead engaging with loss as ongoing, unresolved, and complex.

Drawing on the idea that the elegy is concerned primarily with the overwhelming need to triumph over absence, the session will also question whether such triumph is possible—or even desirable.

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.

About Denise Saul: Denise's debut collection The Room Between Us (Pavilion / Liverpool University Press, 2022) was shortlisted for TS Eliot poetry prize 2022, longlisted for Jhalak prize 2023 and a Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation 2022. It is an innovative elegiac book length sequence that was also highly commended in Forward Poetry Prize 2022. She is the author of two pamphlets: White Narcissi (flipped eye,2007), a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice; and House of Blue (Rack Press, 2012), a PBS Pamphlet Recommendation. Denise is a past winner of The Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and a Fellow of The Complete Works. Denise holds a PhD in Creative Writing (poetry) from the University of Roehampton. She received an ACE Grant for the Arts Award for her video poem collaborative project. Denise is the founder of video poem project, Silent Room: A Journey of Language.

2 hours long

Start time: 9.30am UK time // 4.30pm Perth Australia // 7pm Adelaide //  6pm Darwin // 6.30pm Brisbane // 7.30 pm Sydney, AEST // 9.30pm NZ

Online on Zoom

Times on the homepage of this site are in London, UK Timezone, but when you add the event to your calendar it should be correct for your local time zone.

You can check your timezone against London UK time here: https://greenwichmeantime.com/time-gadgets/time-zone-converter/

Cost £30GBP (with cost effective exchange via STRIPE)

Zoom link and materials will be sent by email at least 2 days prior. If you don’t receive it get in touch with me.

More events here https://www.cathdrake.com