No moondancing, but some very good poetry, very well read (it was one of the very best of the series so far). The Oxfam reading in Marylebone - the third from the end of the historic series now in its fourth year - was a great success last night (see previous post for list of readers). There were around 100 in attendance (including poets and volunteers) and over £700 was donated to the shop. The event started at 7.20 and ended at 10.05 pm - time for a drink and meal after. It went mainly without a hitch (though we'd run out of chairs) and the interval was particularly warm this time - much like a party. It was good to see so many poets in the audience, too.
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....
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