Poet Traci Brimhall Turns Grief Into Form: Odes, Elegies, Ghazals

By Tom Whitfield

Traci Brimhall's essay "How Do You Write Through Grief?" opens with a confession that inverts the usual order of mourning: her mother was still alive when the poet began writing about her as though she were dead. "It was the only way I could imagine writing about her at all," she writes. "Since she never read my poems, I was already safe."

The essay promotes Brimhall's book The Grief Artist, available from Sarabande Books. Its argument is simple and testable: form — poetic, essayistic or handmade — can contain grief that otherwise refuses to be managed.

What does the form actually do?

Brimhall starts from the classical distinction. The ode and the elegy look like separate modes, but she refuses the separation. "Loss doesn't mean that the complexities of love disappear when a person is gone," she writes. "Sadness can still belong in a kiss. Praise can also belong to death." The elegy historically moves through lamentation, celebration and consolation — and she concedes the last stage is the hardest to reach.

She did not write nonfiction about her mother until the week between her death and her funeral. What came out was not the polished essay she wanted. "It was fragments. It was messy. It was incomplete."

How do you fit ghosts into paragraphs?

That question drives the essay's most concrete section. Poetry, she says, taught her how to shape prose. She cites Adrienne Rich, who described form as "part of the strategy—like asbestos gloves—that let me pick up what I couldn't touch barehanded."

The experiments she lists are specific:

• Essay ghazals: each two-sentence section ends on the same word, adapting the poetic radif
• Each ghazal written as both ode and elegy to a different body part
• A prose crown of sonnets and lyrical braids
• Backwards movements in time and classic elegiac couplets

Her verdict is candid: "Not all the forms I tried were successful, but some did become a way to see and hold onto grief."

Grief has always needed a container

Brimhall widens the frame with historical practice. Mourners cut locks of hair and wove them into flowers for hair wreaths. They made wax death masks to preserve a face's final expression. Once photography arrived, they took post-mortem photographs so the beloved's face could still be looked upon if memories faded.

She reaches back to the Greeks, who treated grieving as a public, loud, physical act — one you could outsource. Professional mourners, the moirologists, could be hired to cry the tears that should be yours. "If you can't form the feeling yourself, you can buy a mirror for your heart and watch a hired mourner throw themself on the body of your loved one."

The unresolved ending

The essay refuses a consoling close. Brimhall catalogues her own embodied forms: hospice blankets crocheted for the hospital, a sugar skull embroidered on her mother's funeral photo, a comparison of her mother's last words to famous last words in history, and pilgrimages to haunted houses and haunted-object museums, even to the continent of her mother's birth, chasing a last dream.

The tally is honest. "All of it worked in some way but none of it worked in any complete way. I have never moved into that third stage of the elegy where I am fully consoled."

What does this change for writers working through loss? Brimhall's answer is practical, not therapeutic: form does not finish grief, but it gives lamentation and praise a place to live. "Form—whether poetic, essayistic or mixed media—has given me the space and shapes to contend with all the wounds that time hasn't healed on their own."