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In The Poetry of Mourning, Jahan Ramazani argues that the best modern elegies offer “not a guide to ‘successful’ mourning but a spur to rethinking the vexed experience of grief in the modern world” (ix). Readers should expect “fractured speech” (Ramazani ix) from modern elegies, which, “scorning recovery and transcendence”, remain “unresolved […] and ambivalent” (Ramazani 4). Mark Doty’s elegies embrace the frustrations of limited language and the superfluousness of extravagant experience in a way that supports Ramazani’s claim. ‘White Kimono’ and ‘One of the Rooming Houses of Heaven’ display the “fractured” and “unresolved” ambivalence that Ramazani believes should characterise the modern elegy. Both poems are self-consciously limited and, instead of offering comfort or transcendence, explore the difficulties of commemorating their subjects. In ‘White Kimono’, this frustration springs from the limitations of poetic language; the otherwise expressive speaker finds himself unable to confront the threat of AIDS that looms throughout the poem. ‘One of the Rooming Houses in Heaven’ expresses an opposite frustration at the shallowness of elegies that are richly descriptive yet lack depth. The speaker describes the outer mannerisms of a deceased friend in intimate detail but fails to engage with the complexities of their personality, capturing the experience of their presence but not their interiority. In actively embracing these limitations of language and experience, Doty articulates the nuances of grief, and creates AIDS poetry that goes beyond the polemical.
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