[596] I Say I Say I Say

Guest poem submitted by Victoria Paterson, <cookie_hound@>:

Anyone here had a go at themselves
for a laugh? Anyone opened their wrists
with a blade in the bath? Those in the dark
at the back, listen hard. Those at the front
in the know, those of us who have, hands up,
let's show that inch of lacerated skin
between the forearm and the fist. Let's tell it
like it is: strong drink, a crimson tidemark
round the tub, a yard of lint, white towels
washed a dozen times, still pink. Tough luck.
A passion then for watches, bangles, cuffs.
A likely story: you were lashed by brambles
picking berries from the woods. Come clean, come good,
repeat with me the punch line 'Just like blood'
when those at the back rush forward to say
how a little love goes a long long long way.

	-- Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage is a British poet, aged in (I think) either late twenties or
very early thirties. He has published several collections of poetry, and two
novels (one with another poet called Glyn Maxwell). I suppose, critically
speaking, this isn't his best poem , but it's one of my favorite poems. I
don't know if Armitage has ever attempted suicide, but to me, someone who
has, this poem speaks volumes. I don't know if there's a lot to say about it
- it speaks for itself, I think.

Victoria.

[thomas adds]

A poem that's more than a little reminiscent of Sylvia Plath - witness these
lines in Lady Lazarus: "Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it
exceptionally well. ".

[Britannica on confessional literature]

Confession: in literature, an autobiography, either real or fictitious, in
which intimate and hidden details of the subject's life are revealed. The
first outstanding example of the genre was the Confessions of St. Augustine
(c. AD 400), a painstaking examination of Augustine's progress from juvenile
sinfulness and youthful debauchery to conversion to Christianity and the
triumph of the spirit over the flesh. Others include the Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater (1822), by Thomas De Quincey, focusing on the writer's
early life and his gradual addiction to drug taking, and Confessions
(1782-89), the intimate autobiography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. André Gide
used the form to great effect in such works as Si le grain ne meurt (1920
and 1924; If It Die...), an account of his life from birth to marriage.

Such 20th-century poets as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and
Anne Sexton wrote poetry in the confessional vein, revealing intensely
personal, often painful perceptions and feelings.

	-- EB