As "The Matter With Morris" makes plain, grief and its complications have driven him toward this flailing for meaning.
From afar, Bishop was testing Methfessel, confiding eventually that her two collapses had come as she sank once again into "just plain grief" after "so many sad deaths the past few years, so much insanity, so many god-awful experiences, & so much time lost forever".
Not self-pitying, but a tempered easeful grief, in plain style.
To break the tension, bottled-up grief and just plain exhaustion, some of the workers even indulged in a bit of fantasy.
Connecting these two poems, for Brock-Broido, is a conception of grief as "almost impossible to transform, because it's so plain, it's so simple, it's so universal".
With her pointed, plain manner of speaking from an unassailable platform, Ms. Rodriguez, 49, has channeled her grief to become a relentless advocate for all victims of gang violence, whether undocumented or not.
But Gen. Vang Pao was no plain Hmong elder, and his death last month at age 81 has brought forth no ordinary grief.
Vang Pao was no plain Hmong elder, and his death last month at age 81 has brought forth no ordinary grief for an uprooted nation of Hmong refugees who regarded him as something near a king.
Reflecting on the three-year process of composing her poem, Brock-Broido told Paul Muldoon that grief is an experience that's "almost impossible to transform, because it's so plain, it's so simple, it's so universal".
The song bewailing the killing of children closed with a mention of the 680 killing of the prophet Muhammad's grandson, Hussein, on the plains of Karbala in southern Iraq, commemorated each year in a traditional Shiite holiday of grief.
Sharma's plain style, its gaps and fissures and mighty sense of lack, is both proof of the inability of words to render grief and a demonstration that they can do exactly that.
