Just saw this now - must have been out of the loop to have missed this - actually, just busy with the American elections, teaching, and my own life (poetry does slip sideways and away some times - probably good to let the hot air out of the tires from time to time). Good to see Jen Hadfield on the list - she stayed with my parents for a few days in St. Lambert as part of this epic Canadian journey poem; and Romer. Imlah should win, I'm sure. Maura Dooley has a good shot at this, too. Notably absent are any of the good Salt collections from this year - including those by Katy Evans-Bush. Also, where's the Simmonds? Ah well, at least they got Doty on it. Good luck to them.
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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