finding your muse: falling in love with fellow writer

“A poet should never fall in love with another poet — love is already too much like gambling on oil futures. Two poets in love must succumb to the same folie à deux as the actor and the actress, the magician and the fellow magician, because each knows already the flaws beneath the greasepaint, the pigeons hidden in top hats, all the pockmarked truth beneath illusion. Real lovers, Shakespeare long ago reminded us, have reeking breath and hair like a scouring pad.”

Anyway the above insight was derived from a book titled “Words in Air”. I have always been hooked on books which are actually collections of corresponding letters and writings. Think the lovely “84 Charing Cross Road”. The writing is engaging but what makes it a classic read is what has been left unsaid between the penpals.

“Words in Air” collects the letters between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, from a few months after they met at a dinner party in 1947 to a few weeks before his death of a heart attack 30 years later, a correspondence conducted across continents and oceans as their poetry drove them together and their lives kept them apart.

Now i keep my fingers crossed that Borders stocks this book.