Forum Q&A: David Stavanger responds

With more questions than there was time to answer them, our inaugural ‘What’s Poetry Got To Do With It… Got To Do With It?’ forum in July concluded before our panellists could respond to many of provoking queries raised by our attendees. In this post-Forum Q&A, poet David Stavanger offers his response to a lingering audience question.

—David, poetry as an open suicide note is really powerful and provocative. Do you think about this much in relation to how your poetry might also serve a similar function for readers / other poets who might experience suicidality? i.e. how reading / writing poetry can be part of that either as remedy or expression? 

DAVID STAVANGER

This was very much a thought of that morning at that moment but it was also a deeper realisation that my most recent collection is deeply embedded in all my lived experience. My poetry is a contract to stay that I can turn to on hard days. I can't —and won't—comment on what function their poetry serves in relation to such things. Poetry is very individual. Being actively suicidal is highly personal and profoundly different for everyone, even though there are often universal elements. I don't subscribe to poetry as a remedy, no more than I do the pills in my bathroom drawer. They're part of the spectrum of things that equal tomorrow, and the day after that. If I write a poem and it resonates with someone else and it makes them feel less alone then I am less alone.