Sad news. Karl Malden has died. As Mitch in the stage and film versions of A Streetcar Named Desire, and the priest in On The Waterfront, he was a key 50s character actor closely aligned to the method acting system, and its greatest figure, Marlon Brando. I love Streetcar, and consider it the best American play of the last century, after Long Day's Journey Into Night. He also starred in Fear Strikes Out, that weird 50s baseball film with Tony Perkins that remains one of my guilty pleasures. Malden was also great, in the 70s, in The Streets of San Francisco.
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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