Poets

[was originally 'Most Commented Stories List']


"Poet" may be a better appellation

I'm not sure that it would be a good idea for Februs to define himself as a poet. There was a recent study among writers in Europe that showed that all writers had a higher suicide rate than the average population.

Technical writers were slightly higher, non fiction writers were next higher, fiction writers were higher than them and poets had an incredibly high suicide rate of 20%. 1 out of 5 people who identified themselves as poets killed themselves.

If Februs were to say that he was a poet then we might lose the person whose technical expertise keeps the Library going.

That's all right, then. I write poetry and it has been published in magazines, but I wouldn't like to describe myself as a poet, even if it was my main source of income (which it certainly isn't). My reason, though, is that like "artist" only more so, it implies a kind of hubris: "I'm a poet, so I'm special". I write poetry. So did the medieval/renaissance/reformation balladeers, and they never expected their names to last, only their songs.

As for the reasons for that high suicide rate, I'm sure it has to do with poetry hitting the heights and plumbing the depths. To do that, it can help to be a bit unstable. "The world of a happy man is a happy world" (Wittgenstein), but uniform happiness will not make good poetry. Maybe also it's something to do with the highly personal nature of poetry. You could write fine poetry and not understand much about human relations. You couldn't be like that and write good novels.

What intrigues me about those results is that technical writers have an above average suicide rate! Why??

Did you ever try to read that stuff? Imagine what it would be like to write it.