The London Launch of Life Lines 2 featured readings by Dannie Abse, Sujata Bhatt, Siobhan Campbell, Elaine Feinstein, Wayne Smith, Atilla the Stockbroker and John Hartley Williams and was held at 7pm At The Poets’ Church, St Giles in the Field, London. The collection was in aid of The Darfur Appeal. I'd say about 80-100 people showed up - and maybe 60 remained after the interval. I would have hoped for a larger, more supportive crowd (especially as the CD itself features 56 poets, and many of the poets did not appear). The church was rather cold, too - no heating on. The poets read well, though.
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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