Good news. The first woman (and Scot) to be named as the British poet laureate is Carol Ann Duffy. As one of the leading and most popular of UK poets, whose reach is both wide and deep, hers should prove an excellent decade - and her first act, of giving away the annual fee, isn't bad either (though it might have been useful for travelling around to events, and it isn't clear that Britain really does need yet another annual poetry competition....). I worked with Duffy when she donate poems to the Oxfam Life Lines poetry CD project, and she was extremely generous with her 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. What do I mean by smart?
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