2009 is the tenth anniversary of my first full collection of poems, Budavox, published by DC Books in Montreal, in 1999. The collection represented the work I'd been publishing and performing in the decade 1990-1999, during the time I ran first the New McGill Reading Series (with Bill Furey), then Vox Hunt Cabaret, in Montreal, before moving to Budapest, in late 1997. The title is taken from a famous very tall retro-style sign (now gone) in Budapest, on the Budavox Building. Budavox was a telecommunications company in Hungary. The poems in Budavox explored themes of sexuality, nostalgia, travel, poetics, violence, desire, and popular culture. The book was well-received by critics at the time, and was selected by Geist - then perhaps the hippest culture magazine in Canada - as "one of the five best books" of the year, and sold fairly well, for a book of poetry. I do hope that readers of Eyewear who are interested in poetry will seek it out, to see if it has stood the test of time.
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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