Sad news. One of the leading lights of the Montreal literary scene since the 80s, Sonja Skarstedt, poet, editor, essayist, and publisher, has died of cancer. I have incredibly fond memories of Sonja and Geof (her partner) during the Zymergy days (87-91) when she was editor. She took great photos of the events I was running, then, with Bill Furey, the New McGill Reading Series, which we ran out of the Bistro Duluth. It seems strange to think that was more than 20 years ago now. Sonja was funny, kind, very warm, and very brilliant. She lit up the room when she walked in. She was interested in so many people and ideas, and was a fine writer. She did marvellous things for the community in Montreal, not least by being so supportive of the Louis Dudek legacy. She will be much missed. Her obituary is here.
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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