Dark Poetry and the Anti-Elegiac: Approaching the Unspeakable

Abstract: Dark Tourism is a term associated with pilgrimages to places associated with the famous dead. "Dark Poetry" attempts to imagine, explore, or reanimate a dark event. Using Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust poetry and Mariko Nagai's collection, Irradiated Cities (2017) as examples, we discuss dark poetry's use of an anti-elegiac mode, which focuses on historical particularities in refashioning and problematizing dark events while employing numerous gaps and fragmentations. This poetry, often written by second-generation and non-survivor poets, approaches notions of the ineffable while providing an important bridge between incomprehensible events and the human imagination, and challenging language's capacity to comprehend the "unspeakable."