Ritual and Assemblage: Reading Hybrid Elegy Through Changing American Death Practices

Abstract

In American Hybrid (2009), Cole Swenson describes hybrid poetics as a reconciliation between the two dominant poetic traditions of the 20th century, which might be called lyric and experimental (xx–xxi). More recently, however, “hybrid” refers to any work blurring boundaries between poetry and other genres. This is most notable in the ever-increasing interest in the lyric essay but also in the constant revision of contemporary elegy as anti-elegy. In Poetry of Mourning, Jahan Ramazani defines anti-elegy in terms of its refusal of consolation and instead its seeking of more melancholic mourning. Subsequently, as noted by Bardazzi, Binetti, and Culler, “Elegy remains a poetic genre and yet, it has also developed a ‘mode of discourse’ that moves beyond its literary borders and finds its expressions in entangled intra-actions between the most diverse range of elegiac objects”. In the early 21st century, hybrid elegy represents the collision of two major changes in American culture: the changing nature of American death rituals and the increasingly intermedial literary landscape. Drawing on examples from Nox by Anne Carson and Ghost Of by Diane Khoi Nguyen, an elegiac version of the hyper-personalized American death ritual is inscribed in assemblages of images and text on the page. When read as a personalized American death ritual, the hybrid elegy materializes its own tradition and poetics, which are expressed in the poetic constraints of assemblage and recognizable in their reliance on elegiac repetition.

1. Introduction

Few things have so radically changed the daily business of American creative writing as the launch of Chill Subs in January 2022. Designed by Karina Kupp and Benjamin Davis, the database centralizes information about active literary magazines to make the submission process less overwhelming for writers sending their work out for publication (Firth 2023). Chill Subs (2025) was able to corner the market so quickly because the existing standard, Duotrope, had a variety of shortcomings often decried by writers in the community: it is paywalled, and it has not significantly updated its user interface in the 20 years since its launch. But most important to the concerns of this paper is the difference between each database’s approach to genre (Duotrope 2025).1

Where Duotrope is limited to four searchable genre categories—Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Visual Art—Chill Subs (2025) has eighteen distinct genres. It has the same four general categories as Duotrope but also categories like Micro Fiction, Prose Poetry, Flash CNF, and most notably for this essay, Hybrid. The implicit argument of Duotrope’s genre categories is that designations like “Prose Poetry” and “Flash CNF” fit under the larger umbrella of “Poetry” and “Nonfiction”, respectively. While this is true, it overlooks a fundamental change in thinking about genre. Contemporary writers and Chill Subs (2025) users still acknowledge more established genre categories like Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction, but they are holding those genre distinctions alongside a rising sense of tradition among finer-grain genre distinctions.2 Genres that were once fighting for legitimacy and recognition are not only more widely accepted but also celebrating anniversaries and looking back at their journeys.3 This backward-looking tells us that there is a tradition belonging to these genres once understood as subcategories, oddities, or outliers. Today, these are genres with techniques, practices, and histories unto themselves.4

It is beyond the scope of this paper to define hybrid as a genre distinct from the main categories of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Rather, I will argue that, by considering the intersection of the more nebulously defined “hybrid”5 and a more clearly defined genre in contemporary poetics, elegy, there are insights to be gained about a tradition of hybrid elegy.

Whereas elegies are typically written about with respect to their relationship to tradition, which I will explore in the next section, hybrid texts are more often written about as being new or idiosyncratic. In part, this emerges because of Homi Bhabha’s theorizing of “hybrid” in The Location of Culture, where he describes how “hybrid” culture develops in Third Space—the interactions between a dominant and subaltern culture (Bhabha 2004, pp. 53–56). Throughout the text, his descriptions rely on the nonexistence of these hybrid cultures and forms before colonial interactions, “a kind of moving in-between cultural traditions and revealing hybrid forms of life and art that do not have prior existence within the discrete world of any single culture or language” (Bhabha 2004, p. xiii). By virtue of that prior nonexistence in the discrete contexts of the hegemonic or subaltern groups, “a new, hybrid space of cultural difference [emerges] in the negotiation of colonial power relations” (Bhabha 2004, p. 292, my emphasis).

Bhabha’s emphasis on “newness” is not explicitly theorized in Lisa Lowe’s essential article, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” but it is crucially implied. In the article, Lowe describes how the identity category of “Asian American” flattens distinctions between different Asian cultures and heritages as they arrive in the United States. She argues that “Asian American” is an example of cultural hybridity that does not exist unto itself but is a “constructed figure” (Lowe 2000, p. 541) proliferated by the tension between essentialist ideas of identity and calls for assimilation in the United States (Lowe 2000, p. 548). Lowe argues powerfully for particularization within the larger hybrid category, in order to account for the heterogenous (and intersectional) Asian American identities that are elided. But more important to my argument is that both Bhabha and Lowe describe a definition of hybrid that relies on something that did not exist before a series of interactions between previously discrete groups. This idea of something new emerging from interactions of discrete particulars is what is most often carried into understandings of hybrid forms, like hybrid elegy.

Hybrid elegy uniquely represents the collision of two major changes in American culture in the early 21st century: the changing nature of American death rituals and the ever-increasing multimodality and intermediality of the literary landscape. In the hybrid elegies I focus on in this article, Nox by Anne Carson and Ghost Of by Diane Khoi Nguyen, an elegiac version of the hyper-personalized American death ritual is inscribed into the assemblage of images and text on the page. Moreover, when read in the context of increasingly personalized American death rituals, the hybrid elegy materializes its own tradition and poetics, which are expressed in the poetic constraints of assemblage and recognizable in their reliance on elegiac repetition.

2. The Evolution of the Elegiac Object

Amid the lyricization debates about the flattening of all English-language poetry into one undifferentiated genre,6 elegy has retained its own distinctiveness. In no small part, this is because of the paired influences of The English Elegy: From Spenser to Yeats by Peter Sacks (1987) and The Poetry of Mourning: From Hardy to Heaney by Jahan Ramazani (1994). Sacks’s book is often referred to when describing the long tradition of conventions that are traceable in the “traditional” elegy, while Ramazani’s book is positioned as a continuation and sharpening of the work done by Sacks to describe the “modern” elegy.

Since its publication in 1994, most critical discourse about 20th-century elegy has emerged from Ramazani’s characterizations of the “anti-elegy”.7 According to Ramazani, the anti-elegy “more radically violates previous generic norms than did earlier forms of elegy: it becomes anti-consolatory and anti-encomiastic, anti-Romantic and anti-Victorian, anti-conventional and sometimes even anti-literary” (Ramazani 1994, p. 2). Furthermore, in its “fierce resistance to solace”, the modern anti-elegy is grounded in melancholia, “not transcendence or redemption of loss, but immersion in it” (Ramazani 1994, p. 3). When Ramazani frames modern elegy as being “anti” and offering “fierce resistance”, it suggests a radical break from the elegiac tradition and thus implies a definitive split in the genre.

Despite describing anti-elegy in such definite terms, Ramazani ultimately anticipates something like hybrid elegy by qualifying the radical break with tradition. He explains that “the relation of modern elegy to literary tradition is one neither of seamless continuity nor of complete rupture” (Bardazzi 2023, p. 25). In this way, Ramazani suggests more gradual change and more ambiguous boundaries to the genre category.8 He anticipates his own future monograph Transnational Poetics but also work from scholars like Adele Bardazzi, who argues that the rejection of consolation described by Ramazani anticipates elegy being “disentangled from formal constraints” and “generated a major historical shift from elegy as a poetic form to an elegiac mode” (Bardazzi 2023, p. 27). Bardazzi argues that the site of rejection that Ramazani locates in emotional irresolution shifts to “reworking non-lyric textures, such as the obituary or prose writing, and intertwine them with the lyric,” which characterizes “the novelty of contemporary elegiac writing” (Bardazzi 2023, p. 27). These “novelties” examined by Bardazzi in the rest of the article could be described as “hybrid elegies” since they blend prose and poetry forms—such as Victoria Chang’s Obit, which explicitly rejects the elegy form to write prose poems that borrow from obituary conventions.9

Rather than intertwined genres of text, I am interested in when these “novelties of elegiac writing” are preoccupied with the entanglement of images and text. Especially when the images and text are read as “elegiac objects”, which is suggested in the introduction to the special issue of the Journal of World Literature in which Bardazzi’s article is published. In the introductory essay, titled “Contemporary Entangled Elegy,” the editors Roberto Binetti, Jonathan Culler, and Adele Bardazzi, assert, “all the collected articles converge on the idea of entanglement of contemporary elegies: the individual expression of the elegiac genre does not precede its interaction with other traditions and cultures, but rather contemporary elegiac objects emerge through their intra-actions” (Bardazzi et al. 2023, p. 2). What strikes me as strange is how metaphorically this assertion of their selection principle is applied throughout the special issue. They specifically use the term “elegiac objects,” and yet the material potential of elegy is rarely discussed in the articles included in the special issue. Instead, “object” is more metaphorically applied, as it is in the context of Bardazzi’s discussion of Chang’s Obit as a hybrid form that foregrounds “intra-action” within the poems between poetry and prose. Perhaps more literally than they intended, I am taking up their invitation to consider the materiality of the visual images that are assembled into the pages of the hybrid elegies10 as they inform the constraints of the poems.11 More specifically, I am reading the process of assembling as an emerging personalized American death ritual.

3. The Personalized American Death Ritual and Hybrid Elegy

The hybrid elegy tradition is thrown into sharper focus when read against the rise of the “death denial thesis” and changing death practices in the United States. The major debate in American death practice centers around embalming, which emerged in the late 19th century and became standard practice across the country in the 20th century (Dawdy 2021, p. 73).12 This history and its repercussions were exposed by British investigative journalist, Jessica Mitford. In her 1974 book, The American Way of Death (Mitford 2000), she lays the groundwork for what becomes the oft-cited “death denial thesis.” This asserts that when Americans started outsourcing funerary rituals from the family to the funeral home in the early 20th century, including the embalming of the corpse, they did so from a delusion of immortality borne out of a warped American optimism that denied death as an inevitable part of life.13

In their extensive literature review on the subject, Martin Robert and Laura Tradii demonstrate how the death denial thesis persists in sociology and anthropology and in the main textbooks used in mortuary sciences and death studies curricula (Robert and Tradii 2019, pp. 384–85). But they also show how challenges to the thesis arose as early as the 1970s and continue into present-day “death positive” movements (Robert and Tradii 2019, pp. 378, 384–86). Their review highlights a common observation made by many challengers: that the rituals considered to be most exemplary of death denialism can be interpreted alternatively. For example, while it is true that embalming “denies death” by delaying visible signs of decomposition, it also can be interpreted as extending capitalist beauty values to include the deceased (Robert and Tradii 2019, pp. 377 & 380). Regardless of which side of the death denial debate the critic falls, what becomes clear is that the corpse is the focal point of American death practice.

What happens when the embalmed corpse is not the center of the ritual anymore? In her 2021 book, American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the 21st Century, anthropologist and archaeologist Shannon Lee Dawdy asserts that, while embalming is still the national standard death practice, its popularity has been declining since the beginning of the 21st century because of eco-consciousness, rising costs of embalming, and shifting emphasis of the death ritual. Through ethnographic interviews, Dawdy examines death practices as varied as packing cremated remains into bullets and eco-burials where the deceased become food for trees. Regardless of the specifics of what is done with the corpse, she asserts that “the new American death demonstrates a hunger for ritual meaning and a remarkable creativity in satisfying it” (Dawdy 2021, p. 197). Therefore, rather than perpetuating anything like death denialism, Dawdy argues that this highlights a shared intentionality in American death practice: prioritizing the uniqueness of the relationship between the deceased and the grieving through the development of a personalized ritual.

As poems that dramatize the relationship between the deceased and the grieving, it seems obvious that the abundance of 20th-century elegies should be read as supporting Dawdy’s ideas. But, interestingly, Ramazani does not read the modern anti-elegy tradition this way. In his book, Ramazani supports the death denialism thesis and argues that poets are a subaltern group acting in response to hegemonic cultural trends: “How can we resolve the apparent contradiction between the death-denial in ‘practical life’ and the death obsession in literature? It would seem that creative writers perceived the dying of death consciousness and sought to embalm it in their work” (Ramazani 1994, p. 12). Ramazani reads elegies (and the poets who write them) as resisting and contradicting broader trends toward death denialism in the US. Given the critique of death denialism in anthropology, it is interesting that Ramazani uses the word embalm to describe poetic resistance to death denialism. It suggests that Ramazani himself, like the death denialism challengers, does not think embalming is a form of death denialism. In using “embalm” as the vehicle of the metaphor, it is clear he sees embalming as indicating the same “death obsession” conveyed by elegy. Thus, rather than marking them as distinct from one another, Ramazani winds up inadvertently connecting the broader American death culture with the poetic one, at the intention guiding the choice to embalm.

The logical incongruity at the center of Ramazani’s metaphor makes clear the precise misreading that has been at the center of the American death denialism debate for the past 50 years: the intention that motivates the ritual, not the ritual itself. In fact, when read this way, elegy studies prefigure Dawdy’s anthropological argument that the focus of American death practices has been shifting from replicating a ritual to replicating an underlying intention—to center the relationship between the deceased and the aggrieved—through enacting hyper-personalized rituals.

What does this have to do with hybrid elegy? Well, like the proliferation of death practices that are often read for newness and uniqueness, hybrid elegies are also often read for their idiosyncrasies. But, it is worth noting how they carry forward a longstanding elegiac preoccupation with the relationship between the deceased and the grieving and that they do so by foregrounding their processes of making. Like the American death practice that now foregrounds the making of a personalized death ritual, the American hybrid elegy foregrounds the interactions of objects in assemblage and thus the making (or the poiesis) of its form as a kind of personalized death ritual.

4. Ritual and the Poiesis of Assemblage

Anne Carson’s (2010) is a quintessential example of hybrid elegy that references material and lyric traditions. The text meditates on grief over her brother’s death and their estrangement for most of their adult lives. These circumstances are always in tension with, and often supersede, the actual text of the work. But Carson keeps the circumstances centered in the reading experience by inscribing them into the materiality of the assemblage—photographs,14 cut-out pieces of printed text, and graphite scribbles, all pasted onto pages and photographed—and thus the materiality of Nox’s making.

Carson conflates making and materiality from the reader’s very first encounter with the work by defying the conventions of the book-as-codex, as Nox is printed on a folded scroll encased in a box. But more pointedly, she writes the conflation into the text on the back cover:

When my brother died I made an epitaph for

him in the form of a book. This is a replica

of it, as close as we could get it.

Carson foregrounds making and materiality by referencing an epitaph, which evokes the materiality of a carved gravestone and the “making” of that stone.15 Here, she emphasizes that Nox has a very different composition process than a typical book and should be regarded differently by its readers—it was “made” and then “replicated”. It was not written and then published. By drawing attention to the process of its making, Carson activates a different interpretive framework—one that emphasizes the materiality of the project as much as its textual features.

But within the first few pages of the scroll—I say “page” because the scroll is composed of a sequence of photographs of the pages of the original book she made—she shifts the interpretive frame again when she introduces “elegy” into the project. It is introduced in two ways: through Catullus and in her own reflections. The first page of the scroll displays a typed, smudged, pasted-in copy of Catullus’s elegy 101. The word “elegy” does not explicitly appear on this page, and the reader does not learn until later that this piece of paper is an example of an elegy. But elegy is explicitly invoked on the third page, which presents the first words clearly written by Carson herself: “I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds”. Crucially, Carson names the text an elegy, even if the larger project is an epitaph. From this very first sentence, Carson literally positions the whole text as an elegy inside of an epitaph: an interaction between two discrete modes of meaning-making. Unlike a typical printed elegy, it is a poem that is subordinate to the material facts of its presence. From this moment on, it is impossible to read any of the book without toggling between the frameworks—elegy and assemblage.

By moving between these frameworks, the poiesis of Nox brings together the ritualized “doing” of elegy, as described by Peter Sacks, with the “practice” of making and interpreting assemblages from the world of art, art history, and archaeology. Sacks argues that elegy models “successful mourning” by foregrounding grief “in motion, ensuring a sense of progress and egress, of traversing some distance”. As a result, by foregrounding grief as movement and progress, “the emphasis on the drama, or ‘doing,’ of the elegy is thus part of the crucial self-privileging of the survivors”, rather than the deceased (Carson 2010, p. 19). Sack’s claim extends from the logic that since the deceased cannot “do” anything after death, any ritual that emphasizes “doing” is inherently more for the survivors—whether it is elegy, assemblage, or one of the personalized death rituals described by Dawdy.

Following Sack’s impulse to remember the doing that precedes an elegy, Bill Brown puts the assembling back in assemblage. In “Re-Assemblage (Theory, Practice, Mode)”, Brown reviews the main fields where assemblage is studied: art, art history, archaeology, and critical theory. In particular, he describes how, in studying an assemblage, these different fields will often elide the assembler or the analyst and thus their process of making (Brown 2020, p. 269). When describing assemblage from the world of art, he notes that assemblage has close affinities with the terms collage and montage and “is constituted through the interaction among its component parts, which themselves each have external relations” (Brown 2020, pp. 269, 271). Here, the absent assembler is straightforward: it is the artist who chose which objects should interact with one another. But when considering an archaeological assemblage, Brown notes via archaeologist Rosemary Joyce that the elision of the assembler is trickier. In archaeology, assemblage refers to “a kind of minimal coherence: a group of things found in association” (Brown 2020, p. 268). Thus, Joyce explains, there is a very clear slippage between the assembler from the distant past and the archaeologist in the present who tries to make sense of why things were originally assembled together.16 The resulting assemblage is both the work of an assembler and an analyst—it is both made and theorized at once—but constrained by the limits of the assembled things.

Building on the work done by Brown, scholars like Spencer Lee-Lenfield have started to apply this renewed17 sense of theorized assemblage to important examples of hybrid work, like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. Lenfield’s expansive essay does important work “fusing both senses in which humanists now use the term ‘assemblage’: that of art history and that of critical theory” (Lee-Lenfield 2023, p. 147). He analyzes both the individual images and texts assembled by Cha in her work and how they function as a unitary assemblage. He explains how the choices that Cha makes and her act of assembling them link her to the different traditions from which the individual objects originate. Lenfield demonstrates how a hybrid text can be read as an assemblage, and the assemblage ultimately gains meaning from the implied process of assembling. But he does not account for the slippage described by Joyce and Brown. Lenfield’s analysis emphasizes expansiveness, which is rooted in the artistic freedom of choice as it connects to Deleuzian rhizomatic readings of the assemblage. His analysis does not account for the constraints inherent to an archaeological assemblage, which is always limited by the specific items found in the present. The slippage between analyst and assembler results from those constraints: the analyst must make assumptions about the unknown motivations of the assembler from the distant past. There is no more information available than the items themselves found in loose association. Nox’s assemblage emphasizes this same kind of constraint, since it is bound by the finite number of items that Carson has left from her brother.

Each element of Nox’s assemblage belies a process of how the item came to be included. There are photographs from her childhood, which came from her deceased mother and brother. The photos are collaged with pseudo-definitions of Latin words, which provide translations of each word in the order it appears in the Catullus poem on the first page. The photos and definitions are interspersed with lyrical paragraphs in which Carson describes her grieving-as-composition process: learning about her brother, translating the Catullus poem, and remembering her childhood. The ephemera reference one another to impose some kind of order on the cumbersome scroll and metaphorically offer logic to the fragmented grieving process. For example, each “section” of the scroll is delineated by a definition, and Carson’s lyrical reflective paragraphs are numbered to correspond to the line of the poem that the most proximate Latin word comes from.

Throughout the opening series of paragraphs and pseudo-definitions that correspond to the first line of Catullus’s elegy, Carson consistently follows an alternating pattern—presenting a definition in serifed type and then a paragraph in sans-serif type. But, by the paragraph labeled 2.2, which follows the definition provided for the second word in the second line of the Catullus poem, there is an obvious glitch in the pattern. The 2.2 paragraph is repeated four times.

The first time 2.2 appears (Figure A1), it is on the bottom of a recto page. There is part of a yellowed paper written in blue ballpoint ink collaged above the paragraph. The text of 2.2 introduces readers to the surrounding circumstances of Carson’s estrangement from her brother—“… he ran away in 1978, rather than go to jail. He wandered in Europe and India, seeking something, and sent us postcards or a Christmas gift, no return address”. It also explains the significance of the yellowed paper collaged on the same page: “He wrote only one letter, to my mother, that winter the girl died”.

Carson introduces a critical piece of the ars poetica of Nox: she has a finite number of objects with which to tell the story of her brother. In any process of grieving a loved one’s passing, the bereaved eventually recognizes that there will be no more photographs of them, no more objects acquired by them—that the items left with the bereaved are a finite resource. This is similar to the constraints of an archaeological assemblage, and so the analyst, Carson in this case, must make sense of what the assembler, her brother, left behind. What did Carson miss while they were estranged? Who was the girl who died?

When the reader is confronted with the same spread for a second time (Figure A2), the paragraph is pasted onto the same bottom right corner of the photographed recto page. But the yellowed paper of the letter is presented differently, folded to the left so that it crosses the gutter between the two pages. The repositioning of the letter dramatizes Carson’s manipulation of the page: the letter has been touched, but the paragraph remains unchanged.

The third time the same page is photographed, the letter is unfolded and extends beyond the bounds of the original book’s page. It is the first time in the scroll that the folds do not correspond to the edges of the pages. Instead, the right edge of the recto page ends about a third of the way into a panel of the scroll’s folding, and the rest of the panel is black. The scrap of the unfolded letter is starkly pale in comparison to the black background. The viewer is also confronted by more blue handwriting than previously seen. It is the first time the reader sees the information about the girl dying written in Carson’s brother’s handwriting, “Six days later she was dead. […] I went crazy”. Each manipulation of the letter suggests Carson turning over the letter to read and re-read its contents, as if the information might change. As if there might be something new to learn from the handwritten letter itself rather than the transcription that has already been encountered three times.

The fourth and final time 2.2 is repeated, the letter is still unfolded but flipped so that it again covers the gutter of the spread and the verso page of the book. When the scroll is fully unfolded, the edges of the unfolded letter meet so that the front and back of the letter are visible at the same time and presented as if they were one long continuous slip of paper. It is a presentation of the object that is only possible because of its translation into the scroll. It would not be visible this way in the original book form of Nox: it is only by virtue of the material parameters of the replica that this composition is possible.

The fourth photograph of the letter does not present the reader with a bounty of blue handwriting, only “have no choice” is clearly legible, while the rest is the ghost of what is written on the other side of the thin paper. Instead, the letterhead of the stationary dominates most of the letter’s yellowed paper, introducing the impersonal commercial typography of the “POTOMAC” luxury houseboat company into the spread. This commercial language takes up so much of the page of the only letter Carson has from her brother, and it is the last thing the reader sees before moving on to the next section. It emphasizes the profound limits of what can realistically be found in the letter—Carson is not going to find answers in the luxury boat company advertising. In the words of her brother’s blue handwriting, she will “have no choice” but to keep going, to keep assembling and analyzing. By ending the section about the letter with such impersonal typography, Carson emphasizes the persistent question pulsing through Nox’s assemblage: perhaps there is more to be found in the interactions, since there is nothing else to be found in any singular object.

On the level of curation and choice, there is an important distinction to be made between some of the hybrid works I have referenced throughout and the hybrid elegies I focus on in this article, Nox and Ghost of. Central to the poetics of these hybrid elegies is the issue of who controls what is left behind. Both Carson and Nguyen start from the premise that they are reckoning with the limited assemblage of ephemera left behind by the deceased. In this way, these hybrid elegies are closer to the assemblages studied by an archaeologist or an archivist (rather than those made by an artist), in that the elegists see themselves as not in control of what is left behind by their loved ones. Like an archaeologist who stumbles on a cache of grave goods, they are trying to make sense of a selection of material items over which they did not have control of the initial deposition or selection. It is a process that maps on to the ritual of the aggrieved trying to make sense of the cache of possessions left behind by their deceased loved one. This is what fundamentally distinguishes hybrid elegy assemblages like those described in Anne Carson’s Nox from the assemblages in other hybrid texts such as those described by Lee-Lenfield from Dictee. It also positions the elegist in that slippage between analyst and assembler described by Brown. The hybrid elegist is both analyzing the material objects and assembling them into a hybrid text, incorporating the items left behind into the ritual of elegiac assemblage.18

5. Elegiac Repetition in the Assemblage

In both Anne Carson’s Nox and Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, the material constraints of the assemblage inform the poetic constraints. Nox explicitly grapples with the limited number of her brother’s ephemera that Carson has to work with while she assembles her hybrid elegy—a few postcards, some photographs, and one singular letter. But in Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, that assemblage is even smaller—only five photographs. Before his death by suicide, Nguyen’s brother had cut himself out of these family photos. In the aftermath, Nguyen reckons with his loss by developing a poetic practice of writing into the cut-out spaces. Nguyen’s poetics are not only constrained by the number of things in the assemblage but also the materiality of the cut photographs that constrain the space available to fill with words.

Like Carson, Nguyen emphasizes the finitude of the assemblage through replication. Each photo is printed twice, once for each of the two poetic forms she develops for the book, the Triptych and the Gyotaku. But Nguyen further dramatized the constraints of that finitude by explicitly playing on motifs from each form’s respective visual art referents to describe their poetic constraints: the triptychs are composed in three parts, and the gyotakus “reprint” the shape of the cut-out.

In the triptych poems, the poem unfolds in three parts: On the first page, an image of the cut photograph. On the second page, a poem is written in the shape of the negative space cut into the rectangular photograph. And on the third page, a prose poem is written in the rectangular shape of the original photograph. At first glance, the reader’s impulse is to fit the shape from the second page of the triptych into the rectangular poem on the third, as if it were the missing piece necessary to complete a puzzle. But what becomes strikingly obvious is that, despite advertising shapes that fit into one another, the words do not. Each page is a discrete poem that is visually connected by repeated shapes but not connected by syntax, grammar, or line. Instead, each section must be read on its own before progressing to the next one. The effect is extreme confinement. The reader is aware of precisely how they must read the poem and the extreme spatial limits that have been imposed.

The materiality of the text is heightened when readers encounter the same photograph a second time but used in the gyotaku form. Similar to the second pages of the triptych poems, Nguyen writes text in the shape of the cut-out’s negative space. But the text is not the same in the two shaped poems. And instead of printing it once, as she does on the second page of the triptychs, she borrows from the tradition of gyotaku and prints it multiple times. Japanese gyotaku prints were made by fishermen, who would ink a fish to print it on paper to preserve the size and species of the catch, so that the information about the fish could be distributed (Imbler 2019). While gyotaku typically only printed a single fish on each page, Nguyen creatively interprets this tradition by printing the shaped poem multiple times across the spread of the page to make different compositions of the repeated text shape. The text written in the shape of the cut-out is not the same as the text that appeared in the second panel of that photograph’s “Triptych”. It is new text specific to the photo’s “Gyotaku”, but it functions more as an image than as a readable text since it is manipulated and replicated—often rotated, overlapping, and printed in different tonalities, resulting in more and less readable printings. In the “Gyotaku” shown in Figure A3, the repetition of the same words, “elver oliver”, is part of what makes the poem more legible as an image rather than a poem (Nguyen 2018, p. 46).

Much of the logic of Ghost Of (Nguyen 2018) relies on replication and repetition—repetition of the photograph, of the new poetic forms, and of the shapes of the text. Nguyen carries that repetition into the lines themselves, as seen in the pictured “Gyotaku”. But some of the most striking repetitions of lines appear in the third section of the triptychs. In these poems, readers are confronted by long lines of text, printed close together. The lines are difficult to parse because they lack line breaks and punctuation and are interrupted by large caesuras in the shape of the cut-outs. Nearly all of them incorporate a phrase that is repeated multiple times, which is exaggerated as the repetition is disrupted by the caesura left by the cut-out.

In the example pictured in Figure A4, two passages of repeated language frame the caesura (Nguyen 2018, p. 37). The first starts in the line before the break: “It was hard to think of you cold it was hard to think you think it was hard to think of you it was h […] ard to think; while I slept soundful”. The repeated and tangled use of “think” and “hard” contributes to the difficulty of the line. But this difficulty is compounded by the “you” shifting repeatedly from being the prepositional object to the subject of the sentence. The dramatic caesura in the middle of the word “hard” marks a change in a line that would otherwise be syntactically hard to parse because of the tangled repetitions and shifting prepositional phrases. But, because of the dramatic break and the tangled repetitions, the momentum of the line’s syntax ultimately bridges the gap of the caesura. Crucially, it is not the thrust of logical syntax that propels the reader to discover the end of the sentence. It is something more nonsensical, more desperate, that pulls the eye over the violent gap in the text. It is trying to find the next anchor word in the unspooling sentence: a search that is not really based on syntactic meaning-making but is instead looking for the lifeline of one of those repeated words.

One of the ways that Peter Sacks describes the elegiac inclination toward repetition responds to precisely this attempt to overcome nonsensical absence: “Repetition creates a sense of continuity, of an unbroken pattern such as one may oppose to the extreme discontinuity of death” (Sacks 1987, p. 23). Sacks’s emphasis on “unbroken pattern” here suggests that the momentum of correct syntax is not enough to move over the gap left behind: there must be something more repetitive, more incantatory, to heave meaning over the absence. This is even more dramatized at the end of the pictured poem, where the repetitions are not so tangled in the syntax of the sentence. Instead, they smooth out into a chant that marches across the caesura until it meets the margin of the page: “it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it/keeps me […] alive it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it keeps me alive it keeps”. The repetitions in the lines of the Triptychs emphasize the continuation of syntax over the caesura made by the cut-out, desperately trying to bridge the gap where the absence of the brother is marked. In this way, the text eerily anticipates this metaphorical reading of death rituals from Dawdy: “Rituals are like sutures that aid healthy scarring. Another metaphor might be that death rituals are attempts to reweave the social fabric, to mend the hole left by the loss of one of its members” (Dawdy 2021, p. 60). In the case of Nguyen’s triptychs, the lines never suture closed the gash in the text. But the search for the next repeated word in the line does perhaps suggest a thread that might one day help mend the hole in the fabric of the poem.

This emphasis on repetition as continuity could be misread as participating in larger death denialist impulses. But I think this would be to miss the larger role of repetition and reiteration in acknowledging the trauma of death. As Sacks explains in relation to the elegy, “Repetition is moreover, one of the psychological responses to trauma. The psyche repeats the shocking event, much as the elegy recounts and reiterates the fact of death” (Sacks 1987, p. 23). Specifically, Sacks is emphatic in his claims that repetition on the level of the line is also inscribed in the larger repetition that characterizes ceremony:

At the same time, the repetition of words and refrains and the creation of a certain rhythm of lament have the effect of controlling the expression of grief while also keeping that expression in motion. It is as if the grief might be gradually conjured forth and exorcised. This returns us to the idea of ceremony, and to the idea that repetition may itself be used to create the sense of ceremony. Certainly, by confessing its repetitive nature at large, the elegy takes comfort from its self-insertion into a longstanding convention of grief. And, by repeating the form of the vegetation rites, for example, an individual elegy may borrow the ritual context of consolation.

(Sacks 1987, p. 23, original emphasis)

Although Sacks uses the word ceremony here, he returns us to the idea of process and making as inherent to ritual, as described by Dawdy. Sacks is, of course, specifically talking about traditional lyric elegies. But does this not apply to hybrid elegies, too? In fact, is it not all the more apparent when readers encounter the repetition of paragraph 2.2 in Nox or the repeated printings of the photos in Ghost Of? The intentionality implied by photographing the same paragraph four times, manipulating the same photograph multiple times, repeating the same words in the line, and recording the results inscribes evidence of ritual making (and ritualized grieving) into the hybrid elegy itself.

In this way, the repetition in the hybrid elegy works in two ways. On one level, repetition signals ritual and thus a kind of repeated behavior that could, at its most hopeful, suggest memorialization continuing ad infinitum. But it also, simultaneously, emphasizes the finitude and constraints of the assemblage, since every manipulation of the same letter, the same photographs, serves to emphasize the inability to produce more objects or more information attached to the assembled objects. In these hybrid elegies, the repeated elements demonstrate both at once. Thus, by critically troubling ritual’s relationship to repetition, these elegies imply that the goal of ritual is no longer solely repetition forever into the future in order to remember the deceased for as long as possible. Instead, it is to reiterate finitude through the limitations of material artifacts. In this way, the poiesis of hybrid elegiac assemblage imposes constraints that are familiar across poetic practice—not necessarily to offer consolation or sustain anti-elegiac melancholia but instead to offer a method for interacting with the experience of loss.

6. Conclusions

The specific features of archaeological assemblage more clearly mark the participation of hybrid elegy in the larger cultural landscape. Specifically, they make the connection between elegy and the increasingly personalized American death rituals more recognizable and offer a framework for better understanding it.

In the concluding chapter of her book, Shannon Dawdy writes that “if the community of practice that once defined the death ritual was broadly national in the United States, that community has now disintegrated into tiny bits” (Dawdy 2021, p. 198). She explains that many anthropologists read this as the end of ritual—since ritual is reliant on a community adopting and repeating it into the future, rather than disparate practices adopted by individuals. But Dawdy offers a dissenting anthropological opinion: that the “new American death demonstrates a hunger for ritual meaning and a remarkable creativity in satisfying it” (Dawdy 2021, p. 197).

Anne Carson and Diana Khoi Nguyen ultimately leverage their assemblages as vital accessories for their personalized rituals of grieving. Moreover, they offer a better framework for understanding the nebulous “creativity” that Dawdy refers to. The framework of assemblage initially appears incredibly personalized and “creative”, since the assortment of objects in assemblage and how the bereaved interact with those objects will vary so wildly. But what Carson and Nguyen make clear in their work is a commonly held—dare I say, ritualized?—navigation of these disparate assemblages. So, while archaeological assemblage clearly elucidates a poetic constraint found in hybrid elegy, it is worth considering how this poiesis might in turn offer a framework for understanding the nature of these changing rituals.

After all, who is better positioned in our culture than intermedial elegiac poets to display the full potential for personalized ritual making? In a cultural landscape that often positions intermediality as hybrid, and hybrid as fringe to tradition, the case study of hybrid elegy offers an opportunity to see how quickly the personal and idiosyncratic can become recognizably traditional and how tradition can always be renewed.