Tom Paulin was on the Andrew Marr Start The Week radio show this morning, on the BBC, talking about his new Faber book. Asked by the intrepid Marr of the state of poetry, especially with regards to the digital age and the Internet, what did he do? Paulin didn't talk about blogs, or e-books, or web sites, or the way the Internet is the key to getting more poems to more young readers, etc. - no, instead, he talked about how the net is a great search tool for discovering the roots of old words, like rood. Indeed, the net is a very powerful series of search engines, and this quirky answer is most intriguing, and ambiguous as hell. But a bit of a missed opportunity, maybe, 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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