Learning to write publishable material is essentially a social process. It’s like learning to say, ‘Oh not so bad, not so bad,’ when someone asks you how you are, rather than actually telling them anything.
“Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.”
Anne Carson | Eros the Bittersweet