According to this Guardian article, Britain is "scared" of the Canadian genius, Frank Gehry. Although Gehry is widely considered the most important innovative North American architect of the postmodern period, and perhaps since Frank Lloyd Wright, Gehry has never been commisioned to design a major building in the UK, even now as he nears his 9th decade. Pity - it seems a lost opportunity. Why does Britain resist some North American innovators, and not others? Crane, Stevens, Olson, Ginsberg, Cohen, O'Hara, Ashbery - all have had their admirers, in poetry, but rarely a mainstream welcome.
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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