Contributor’s Marginalia: C.T. Salazar on “Elegy as Insistence: Bulls in a Field” by Jan Verberkmoes

Jan Verberkmoes’ “Elegy as Insistence: Bulls in a Field” is elegy at its most ambitious and restless. How to study loss—make a subject lose. Please never learn his name. It’s not about him, it’s about his loss. We need distance from the subject, should we be tempted to join him in mourning. I love it when titles function as instructions. The elegy announces itself: we know we enter a space built entirely around absence. We know what lacks and we know what’s left: there is only morning.

The bulls are a necessary weight in this poem. Without them, the field would float away. I love them for their mindlessness. I love them, their anvil heads–a reminder of the grief impulse. The choice between seeing a thing for what it is, and the fallacy of seeing a thing for what it resembles. Georges Braque: “The senses deform, the mind forms.” In loss, our comfort in symbol: in turning the subject slightly away to not look in his eyes. Easier to love the bulls than reconcile loss. Reading Jan’s poem I keep returning to Pablo Picasso’s “Bull” (1945). What this series of lithographs teach us is that we can erase without destroying essence. Or rather, when we take away, essence fills the shape with itself. Yes, think of river water in the shape of a river. Think of river water rushing into a jar.

Where the insistence most fills me with awe is the poem’s steady filling with loss. Does the elegy attempt to reckon most with processing death or processing not being dead? Conundrum: in Jan’s poem is the labor of filling and filling, but what are we full of? And nothing could be so empty / as the jar in his hands. To have reached the end, to have filled the poem and still have only made an emptiness.