Being unbearable hardly ever leads to…group merriment. It’s a more solitary activity. But I don’t actually know what it is to be unbearable. I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they’re both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that’s almost happening, never quite totally happening.
Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry No. 88, Interviewed by Will Aitken