Kathleen Rooney profiles the poet Matt Rasmussen, whose collection Black Aperture grapples with the suicide of his brother:
“There is a strange anger toward the person who’s committed suicide that might not be present when someone similarly dies unexpectedly,” he said in our email interview. “Certainly there is anger and disbelief when someone tragically dies, but with suicide it’s directed at the person who has died. This anger, however, is tempered with a feeling of remorse or intense sorrow for the person who took his or her own life because no longer are they the person you knew. […] When someone dies of suicide there is a reluctance to talk about them, or remember them, because they are no longer who you thought they were, so I think there tends to be an immense silence that surrounds a suicide.”
In this regard, his elegies are more like those of Ruth Stone, also a frequent elegizer of a suicide: that of her husband Walter. Her poems, too, possess a silence—a suppression of the dead loved one—but also a loudness that happens when the loved one appears again, unbidden, running as an undercurrent through every other activity those left behind have to do just because they’re still alive.
For an example of Stone’s poetry, read “This Is How It Is“. The recent Dish thread on suicide is here.
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