The whispering dead
DEATH. We don't understand it. How can a person exist so completely — with a complex consciousness and personal gifts, with love, with ties, with a history and memories — until the final and inevitable moment of death? Where the heck does all that LIFE go?Naturally, we fear death. In that moment, the body becomes just a body again and begins its process of organic release, water and carbons and the rest. This end, this big unknown, awaits us all — our knowledge of death (and, sometimes, our denial of it) underscores all human endeavour. You can run but you can't hide, right? It all seems so unfair. So impossibly ironic, so CRUEL.WE TALK about a flame at the moment of its extinguishing. A switch being flicked. A light dying. Metaphors creep in. It's easier to describe what death is like, than what it is.Enter POETRY, the trusty wrangler of the unknowable. The great secret language of the ineffable. Why is poetry an especially good medium for writing about death? Because it pairs the concrete with the abstract to illuminate hidden 'truths'. Because it slips easily between THE REAL AND THE IMAGINED, to form new associations, to capture the strange and liminal.Because ... when we write poetry, we declare to the world: the story I need to tell doesn't fit neatly into sentences or scenes. It is wonky and raw. It needs space but also constraint. It needs to tear a hole in the page.
Rhyming the dead — working with Red Room Company
Need to know more about poetry's wonderful KNACK for examining death? Look out for Red Room Company's new project called Rhyming the Dead. I've written a suite of poems in response to the late Dorothy Porter's work — and the experience was a hundred different kinds of amazing. Look out for the radio series coming soon.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTGbm8Qm6Q8
Death in the mountains — a Varuna Fellowship
Plus — a great piece of GOOD FORTUNE's come my way. I'll be spending two weeks in August in the beautiful Blue Mountains to finish my poetry collection draft, recounting 'personal responses to death'.
Your favourites
Any favourite poems about death? Kenneth Slessor's 'Five Bells'? WH Auden's 'Funeral Blues'? Please share.