One of the eccentric-yet-significant writers of the 20th century, Robbe-Grillet, has died. Aside from his infamous new style of novel, which sought to do away with plot as if it was but one more victim in a murder mystery, he scripted L'Année dernière à Marienbad - which remains one of Eyewear's favourite films. Its influence is everywhere, most recently in the temporally-refracted editing of Atonement's first 40 or so minutes (itself set in a similar space of fountains and gardens, though in miniature). He also wrote and directed other works for the cinema, though none with quite the same impact. At one stage, it might have seemed he would have been an intriguing candidate for a Nobel, but his eminence waned, if not his name, which remained the ultimate in one form of French avant-garde sophistication.
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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