My poem for Kenneth Graham Crump started out as an elegy in the traditional sense (i.e., a poem, as defined by Edward Hirsch’s A Poet’s Glossary, “of grief, sadness, or loss” ), but I soon began to question this mode as I attempted to honor Crump.  Does the elegy not center the poet’s grief for and/or their imagination of someone else’s life? Without knowing much information about Crump, I decided to transform the poem into one where the speaker of the poem is the poet, giving themself the command to not try to “partner” Crump in he “dance” of his life because it would be presumptuous and, thus, unethical.

In this way, I hope I embodied two important poems that respond to the expectations of elegy. The first is  Polish poet and Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska’s “Photograph of September 11,” in which she writes, “I can do only two things for them— / describe this flight / and not add a last line.” Her expressed conviction is that to honor someone who has died through a poem, the poet must acknowledge their lives, but they must not attempt to editorialize their experience, especially when it comes to their traumatic deaths. As such, I did not want to reference the specifics of Crump’s death, as I believe that everyone should be remember for their lives, not the circumstances of their deaths. Another sentiment guiding the approach to this poem is by Cameron Awkward-Rich, a transmasculine Black poet, who writes in his poem “Anti-Elegy” that “The trouble with elegy / is that it asks the dead // to live, it calls them back. / & who am I to say rise?” Awkward-Rich suggests that elegy asks the dead to perform for us, in order to assuage our survivor’s guilt.

Performance is a trope in my poem, in that the text is dominated by a motif of ballet, an art form Crump loved and practiced. The title uses the “pas de deux” (i.e., “a dance for two people” from the “French, literally ‘step of two'”) as a way to invoke Crump, the poem’s elegized subject. But ultimately the poet-speaker resists “partnering” the danseur, who is figured as Crump, because the poet doesn’t know the steps and they will “never / come close to the danseur,” in part because Crump also doesn’t enter “stage” of the poem but, rather, remains somewhere in the wings.

The poet-speaker also rejects the binary of shadow and light, which often appear as cliché in our cultures’ languages around death. I hope that the rejection of this binary also suggests a rejection of all binaries, including those that describe dimensions of our identities, including but not limited to gender and sexuality.

Although I am not usually a formal poet, this poem is in the French form of the rondeau, which, “is composed of fifteen lines, eight to ten syllables each, divided stanzaically into a quintet, a quatrain, and a sestet,” according to the Academy of American Poets’s “Glossary of Poetic Terms.” I chose the form because of its historic association with music. That being said, it does not strictly follow this forme fixe, in part because the balletic form of the pas de deux is also fractured by the absences of the elegized subject and the poet’s refusal to “dance” according to the steps elegies are supposed to take.