Peter Gizzi and Denise Riley — Love, Openness, and the Art of the Elegy
Two world-leading poets, American master Peter Gizzi and British poet-philosopher Denise Riley, share readings and discuss love, openness, and the elegy.
Why we picked this
Peter Gizzi and Denise Riley have both written about grief and love with unusual philosophical precision — putting them on a stage together to discuss the elegy is an invitation to watch two very different minds find where their thinking overlaps.
Peter Gizzi is widely regarded as one of the most significant American poets of his generation — a writer whose work fuses the formal experimentation of the New American poetry tradition with a lyricism that is never quite comfortable and never quite cold. His poems have a way of holding grief and beauty in the same line without resolving the tension, which makes him a natural fit for a conversation about the elegy.
Denise Riley is a different kind of poet: a British writer and philosopher whose work circles questions of time, loss, and the grammatical strangeness of grief. Her book Time Lived, Without Its Flow, written after the death of her son, is among the most formally rigorous and emotionally honest accounts of bereavement in recent literature. She approaches the problem of the elegy not as a formal container but as a philosophical problem — how do you write about someone who is no longer there to be written about?
The afternoon pairing, as part of the Poetry International Festival at the Southbank Centre, brings these two poets together to read from their work and to talk about what the elegy can and cannot do. It is a rare chance to hear two serious poets discuss a form they have both inhabited deeply, in a room small enough to feel like a real conversation rather than a performance of one.