Thanks to all those who came, or wrote, or called, about last night's launch. It was a resounding success, and very moving. The Calder Bookshop on The Cut was packed, we sold almost all the books we had, and many of my dear friends, and very fine poets, were in attendance - and on a night of monsoon-like rains. I must thank especially Emily Berry, Les Robinson, and my wife, for making the night so special. The book is now on sale at the tall-lighthouse site, for those who couldn't be there. And, thank you to those who have written about my health. I have a painful but treatable condition which can usually be resolved in a few months, without surgery, and there is no current worry it is pre-cancerous (though it can go in that direction). My spirits were raised by the launch. But the weeks ahead will be a challenge. I am juggling teaching, co-editing a Carcanet anthology, finishing my PhD, and the usual writing and organising. I may well have to take it easier. I move back to Maida Vale on Friday, after 6 months of renovations on our flat. Looking forward to that to. I will try to start to post the backlog of reviews and features in October, sorry for delay.
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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