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?
Sad news. Maxine Cooper (pictured) has died. She starred in one of the major 50s noirs, and an Eyewear favourite, Kiss Me Deadly, the anti-atomic hardboiled flick with the erotic sucker punch. She was also basically blacklisted for being an activist and too smart for her own good. Hollywood doesn't know where to put women's minds, sadly. I hear the new Jane Campion film about Keats may win at Cannes this year, by the way. Campion is one of only several female directors in a tediously male game. Time to break the glass ceiling for the silver screen.
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