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. What do I mean by smart?
I've been reviewing for Books in Canada over the past three or four years. Now, thanks to the magic of the Internet, those persons not based in Canada, or able to secure a subscription, can access many of the reviews online (by others, as well). The typography is a little off - dashes appear as gobbledygook - but otherwise, it is all coherent. For instance, my review of the controversial Paterson and Simic anthology of British poetry that was published a few years back, or that anthology of Irish poetry, Breaking The Skin. There's also something on a recent collection of essays by Al Alvarez. I am most proud of my review of the Welles book by Simon Callow.
Comments