But it’s real hell for real poets when love goes right
When the war is over and the blood, the mud, the Muse depart
Requited love, gratified desire ‘write white’
And suffering’s the sweetest source for the profoudest art.
Lines from ‘Hell For Poets’ by Glasgow based poet & playwright Liz Lochhead
In this poem , I like the mockery of the notion that happiness is somehow incompatable with ‘high’ art – that poets and artists need to, as Leonard Cohen once said, suffer on our behalf. Somehow despair and sadness are viewed as on a deeper emotional level. Maybe instead what we need to do is to love the now and celebrate shallowness too?
( See more about Liz Lochhead here)
