Last night saw a poetry reading to raise funds for Oxfam, and to celebrate the CD Life Lines 2, featuring Wendy Cope, Blake Morrison, Daljit Nagra, Fiona Sampson, Todd Swift and Jonathan Ward, in The Great Hall, at Dulwich College. The venue was superb, there were more than 260 in attendance, and many books and CDs were sold. The poets all read well, too. It was a great honour to be a part of the night.
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....
Comments
I found out about the Life Lines event on your blog and happen to live locally, so I went along last night and really enjoyed it.
I'm sure writing a blog sometimes feels like a one-way conversation, so I thought I'd drop a quick note to say thanks very much - it's really appreciated.
Nick