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I found Scarry quite interesting and inspirational myself and was I felt related to the piece I did for poethia online a couple of months ago to show you just how relevant to war and our current situation her writings are. By the way, i think the reality of who commits suicide and who doesn't is closer to the model Pennebaker uses than popular conceptions of suicidal people. They are certainly no people who go around dwelling on suicide and sadness. durkhim is atheoretician people in the field do read and contrary to TV portrayals of suicide it often is done by 'unlikely' people as you sourself can verify looking at writers who committed suicide versus those who wrote or talked about it. In my case, for example, the last time the thought came up what dsisuaded me was thoughts about others rahter than thinking about my I whatever that might mean. tom bell ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 10:53 AM Subject: Re: Poetry & Psych > 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/