Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Kali Tal
Subject: Re: what does it do?
Maria Damon (hey, are you the Maria Damon who wrote "MIAs and the Body
Politic?) asks how can
> the paradigm of poetry-as-therapy, as in psychiatric-ward workshops
> –be understood in terms of the "cultural work" they perform? rather
> than dismissing them out of hand as trite and derivative, how can we
> use them to understand, shoemaker suggests, the multiple "purposes"
> of poetry.–maria d
And Ryan Knighton notes:
> The value of these forms of writing goes beyond, perhaps, poetry.
> Grice, for example, used psychiatric-ward writings and taped dis-
> cussions in his research. This research yielded the expansion and
> adaptation of Kantian maxims to discourse analysis (i.e. the
> Cooperative Principles of "relevance", "cohesion", "manner", etc…).
> His findings are very political insofar as they disclose another
> relationship between power and language (i.e. rights of passage
> into discursive communities).
I am preoccupied with these questions, working, as I do, primarily with soldier
poets and other authors of what I call "literature of trauma." In my forthcoming
book, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge, October
1995), I spend a lot of time making connections between poetry and power,
therapy and politics. I’ve done a lengthy study of the work of poet W.D.
Ehrhart (probably almost unknown in this crowd), who is one of the most