‘Loss,’ writes David Kennedy in his thought-provoking study, Elegy, ‘may, in fact, be inextricable from our general experience,’ and he goes on to note ‘contemporary poetry’s overwhelmingly elegiac mood.’ With Kennedy’s discussion in mind, this paper discusses the author’s personal engagement with Richard Brautigan’s poetic prose in order to explore the ways in which prose poetry, through its restless formal hybridity – of which Lyn Hejinian notes that its ‘implication (correct) is that the words and ideas (thoughts, perceptions, etc. – the materials) continue beyond the work – provides the ideal arena to express the elegiac mode in a manner that reaches beyond the lyric or confessional.
Keywords: Prose poetry – elegy – loss – Brautigan – creative practise
