Life and Death and Poetry - Julie R. Enszer

As part of the upcoming web-based WOM-PO poetry festival, Julie Enszer has contributed an article on women poets that should be required reading. It is incisive and expansive (as Julie usually is) and thought-provoking. She writes of poets who have committed suicide and our need to see the cultural conditions surrounding them, and understand them as a way to see our own future as "one that is released from these oppressive narratives. Our future is--and must be--one where we are the recorders, not the suicides. Our future is--and must be--where we bear witness to death and to life so that we can all live inspired, not shackled, by the poetic muse."

Enough said. Go read it.