Annie Finch has blogged at the Poetry Foundation site about her visit to Britain, and makes some intriguing and relevant comparisons between American and British poetic culture (as she observed it). In the post, she calls my Oxfam series event (for which she read) the single-best organised bookshop poetry event she has ever been at. I'm chuffed. I've been organising and compering (hosting) poetry events and cabarets for 25 years now (started when I was 18) and always believed that poetry emceeing was an art form (however minor). Since 2004, I've tried to make the Oxfam events at 91 Marylebone High Street as good as any reading can be. Nice to have a poet say so.
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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