There is a scene in Control which must be the funniest moment in a movie about a suicidal epileptic nihlistic musician. His manager comments to his depressive friend, "at least you're not the lead singer of The Fall". Ron Silliman can always take comfort in not being part of "Official Verse Culture", though as his famous blog wittily (?) observes, his cohort, Language poet Charles Bernstein seems to have been ushered into that frame recently. Silliman's Blog recently reached the "over a million burgers served" moment refered to in the title of this post. That's good for poetry, and good for the blogosphere. Bravo.
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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