Poets, Unbearable and Otherwise

Poets are unbearable to one another. You have to see them with other people to know what they're like.

--Elias Canetti (from Notes from Hampstead)

Tom Beckett posted those words some years back on the Poetics list and they were immediately (and gratefully) scribbled down here and probably elsewhere. You wouldn't be able to disprove that notion with recent goings-on in the blogosphere. And of course permanent aesthetic revolution makes a certain amount of friendly fire and outright fratricide inevitable.

But the strumpet is having one of those rare and bracing weeks that make the whole absurd poetic errand seem not only doable, but really (given her odd predilections) the only thing worth doing.

We're not talking about writing here, or not only about writing; what's happening is happening between two people, two of those unbearable poets, and includes in its scope everything from the tiniest details on their pages to their riskiest sallies toward a larger canvas.

Wanted to say more -- but it's almost dawn and time's run out.

Back when we're not at the heart of it.