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… Since the art of the writing doesn't always make a writer's seriousness apparent, it's sometimes necessary to reveal the depth of one's personal anguish by other means. Killing yourself seems to mean that you were serious after all …. much seriousness is suddenly revealed in the work — where it had escaped notice before.
In certain psychologically oriented discussions of contemporary poets it seems au courant, when considering the suicidal deaths of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, to say something about the danger of writing poetry about death. What is implied in these discussions is the notion of “risk writing”; that is, that one can, by writing about death, write oneself, as it were, to death; that there is a palpable danger and risk in writing “too much” about death and that such writing increases the possibility of a fatal self-fulfilling prophesy.
The general question is: To what extent can anyone write himself or herself to death? Is it possible for a writer (a novelist or a poet) to be so caught up with imageries of death that he or she then feels that there is a need to be dead (by suicide) in order to show a certain deep loyalty to the creations themselves or in order to validate what has been written so as to prove the seriousness of the writing process? In its most general form the question can be put: Is there such a phenomenon as “risk writing”?