Love is not interesting to the poet, because love is solipsism. It is perfectly interesting for the people involved, but it rapidly bores all others, the putative audience. This is at once the great success & downfall of the enterprise.
Let me reformulate: rather, love should not be interesting to the poet. A sign of a good poet is a cautious distance kept from the subject: as an abstract concept, everyone already knows what you’re talking about, so there’s no need for the rearticulation; as a personal enterprise, no one wants to hear about the whorl of your lover’s chest hair, or the way that the two of you make breakfast.
This is not to say that one cannot write love in an interesting fashion; however, it is to caution the poet, of all people, on the matter, for it is he who most regularly & shamelessly writes himself in his work. Without the apparatus of plot or any other structural or dramatic mechanism to provide interest & backbone—to simulate the process of falling in love for the reader—the poet, with no one to guide him, is far more likely than most to merely indulge himself & bore everyone else.
It is not so much the problem of learning the previously-unknown, though that is part of it. More, it is that the problem of the unknown is one that remains relevant to the reader, because everyone speculates but no one has all of the answers. Your guess is as good as mine, reader, & what’s more is that all reading is identical with the infatuee’s quest for more information. As knowledge becomes more readily available, its price drops, & we are left with less interest in its acquisition.
Writers, notorious as philanderers & divorcees as they are, should perhaps learn to differentiate between the mechanisms of love & those of seduction. Their enterprise—writing—is the latter. As such, the latter’s games, schemas, architectures will always be more interesting, however unnecessary to a right understanding of the former. The distinction between passion & love is a useful one for the writer, though not necessarily as it pertains to a successful love life for him. More likely, the distinction will make him a better writer, a better lover, & a worse partner.
—lc
One Comment
Paragraph 3: STRONG STRONG YES.
Paragraph 4: Fairly strong, in a “tease me out for a while and you will see the light” way. I’m assuming a connection between ubiquitous love poetry with knowledge economies when I read this. Further assuming that all that could be taken here for knowledge on this subject then, is speculation, which ties in with the ‘love is a great mystery,’ or as I like to call them ‘love is an onion with endless layers’ camp. Few people would argue against the idea that endless speculation can become tedious and boring, but I cannot follow the rhetorical line that flows love is an unknowable subject—–>poetic ruminations on the subject then possess nil knowledge value—–>the more poetic contributions, the more zeros floating around and thus all the zeros are worth less.
Paragraph 5: STRONG STRONG YES. A writer’s inescapability from his output — the more the poetry is honed, etc. etc. etc?