LAUSR

ABSTRACT No matter how hard we try to grasp it fully, something about suicide always remains out of reach or outside of knowledge, unspoken, shrouded by the privacy and singularity of the moment in which someone suicided. How do we, the living, respond to this secret, to this bad timing so to speak? How do we give voice to the unspoken, which ironically is bespoken and embodied the moment it comes to be? In this paper we respond to the secret of suicide by examining how poetry resonates through suicide’s bad timing. Our discussion orbits around four parts of one poem entitled, ‘Suicide Quartet in Four Voices’. Keeping company with thinkers such as Jan Zwicky, Jacques Derrida, Elizabeth Grosz, Emmanuel Levinas and Margaret Atwood, we analyse how the viscerality of the body and time constitute what comes across as beyond the limits of understanding suicide. We also examine the embodied thinking of poets whose work honours suicide’s bad timing. We argue that poetry bears witness to the gift of suicide – an ethical demand placed on the living to honour what is vulnerable and visceral in death as much as it is in life.