When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
I know you are very busy this year bringing all kinds of electronic games to all the good boys and girls of the rich world, but if you have any time, could you send a red-nosed reindeer to help the International Red Cross in their campaign to ban cluster bombs. Those toys only hurt people don't they? Lots of people ask for peace, but from what I have seen, peace can't happen yet. So all I want this year is a few small things. Next year I'll ask you for a miracle,
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