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?
Sad news. Norwich Union is to change its name to Aviva. As a student of Creative Writing at UEA, I was - and am - often in Norwich - a city famed far and wide for its eponymous life insurance company. Aviva strikes me as the sort of bland globalspeak that does no one any good, and aims to avoid striking any chords or nerves - but its very blandness rankles. I suppose it does have the latinate life at its root - but the better name was the one that had a home, a real city, at its heart.
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