Shameless plug time. My latest collection, Winter Tennis, was not published in the UK, and was thus not up for the Eliot Prize. Nor is it likely to be reviewed much, or at all, in Britain, though I live and work here. One of the challenges of being a Canadian poet in London. Anyway, Alberta is the new next big thing, and, fortunately, someone has noticed the book there. This is, as far as I can tell, the first and only review of WT, so far. Maurice Mierau writes that "Winter Tennis is an elegantly crafted book, and Swift is tuned in to the English language as a global inheritance in a way that more Canadian poets should be."
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?
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