Poets are extraordinary bucket-kickers

This from Gawker. And pretty much every other blog or newsy place, too (CNN, the Poetry Foundation, Silliman's and Oliver de la Paz's blogs to name a few). I see "studies" like it in the news every couple of years. My conspiracy theory is that it's a ploy to get people interested in poetry and its vast collection of lovely corpses.

But really. I bet you could substitute just about any genre of artist (other than fiction writers) for "poet" and the same would be true. Ukrainian egg painters, emo rockers, mimes, etc. Maybe, instead of studying nancy-boy poets and our notoriously weak constitutions (the nature of which has already been established, I think), maybe these dogged "scholars" should study the unnatural longevity of fiction writers. That, my friends, might actually turn up some useful information.

My favorite comment on the Gawker post comes from a user named, appropriately enough, "riskybusiness": "This is not surprising at all, considering how stabby poets make me feel." Me too, risky, me too.