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At 12:23 PM -0500 17/8/03, tom bell wrote: >Sorry, all, i seems to have gotten embedded in an argument and i reall >don't know what anyone is trying to say. I posted what I did in the spirit >of exchanging information but apparently that wasn't clear from my original >post. Sorry to have disturbed you. No disturbance, Tom, and I'm sorry if the argument sounded more aggressive than was intended. It's a by product of interest, honest! Though I have to say his approach to writing for people with trauma &c certainly seems therapeutic and, in the terms he's talking about, I think he's correct. But that's another question. I had as direct contrast the linguistic analyses of Elaine Scarry, whose book The Body in Pain I am idly rereading at the moment. They are themselves not directly about poetry, but have subtlety and inflection and fluidity and attentiveness and so make me think about poems (and, although the book was written decades ago now, frightening relevance - her discussions of the alienated language of war could have been written directly about the WMD debate). The major questions for me were those about truth-telling and lying, and where fiction might exist in that spectrum, or whether fiction writing might destabilise such ideas altogether, and the question of the choices of suicidal and non-suicidal poets and how the representative poems were chosen, including the unaaddressed issue of translated texts, which made the conclusions extremely contingent, to the point, perhaps, of uselessness. Best A -- Alison Croggon Blog http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com Editor, Masthead http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/ Home page http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/