The GG's are still Canada's biggest literary awards. Announced on October 21, these are the poetry finalists for this year: Weyman Chan's Noise from the Laundry; A.F. Moritz's The Sentinel; Sachiko Murakami's The Invisibility Exhibit; Jacob Scheier's More to Keep Us Warm and Ruth Roach Pierson's Aide-Memoire. Eyewear ran a review of the Moritz earlier this year. It's a very good book, and likely the favourite. One comment - knowing, as I do, how rich and roiling the CanPoetry scene is currently, I am a little surprised at not seeing more of the younger poets now rising in the ranks, including Boyd, or Mooney.
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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