900 posts at Eyewear. Why? And, now it's done, where to? 900 pages in a book, that'd be a lot! Somehow, though, there's ennui in this, a public wasting of energy. Readers will know I've begun to add more reviews, and work, by other writers and poets - increasingly, it seems uninteresting to focus on my own work alone (indeed, I have a pile of recent publications to announce, but never find the enthusiasm for it). Anyway, I've decided to keep the blog going a little longer, at least until the end of April.
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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