James I Wanted To Ask You

Roger Nash is a philosophy professor at Laurentian University and the
author of Night Flying.

This book is intended as an elegy on the death of a friend, using the
beginning of Milton’s Lycidas as an epigraph. For some, Milton’s
poem can seem more concerned with developing somewhat artificial imagery
than with mourning a loss; and Holmes agrees, viewing all elegies as
“more about the writer and the process of writing than about the
elegized.”

The author admits that the death of a friend becomes merely an occasion
for duping himself into believing that he has something to say as a
writer; and that, as a result, the elegized drops from the poem. He
recognizes, too, that he does not really know or love the “friend,”
and so is unable to find any significance to celebrate in him. This is a
solipsistic “elegy,” without grief or sense of loss.

So what was the poetic point of writing this so-called elegy? And what
is the point of reading it? Indeed, what is Holmes’s conception of the
reader? His self-recognition as “monstrous fucking ego” suggests he
wants to commandeer and insult the reader by a parade of self.
Certainly, his view of reading as a kind of passionless, casual
masturbation shows little respect for readers. Perhaps Holmes’s
writing was in some way cathartic for him, but that does not make it
good poetry.