Friends, the new assistant editor of Eyewear is Ms. Kavita Joshi. She is a fine younger British poet and recent university graduate from Leicester, where she studied literature. From time to time she may update the site. Mainly, she will oversee it in a caretaker capacity. Hopefully, pending reviews can be added later in the year.
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?
Comments
Welcome to Eyewear! If you do half as good a job as Todd, you'll be doing just fine.
Best wishes from Simon & Rusty
I'm doing some PR for Gallic books and was wondering if I could suggest a couple of books for review? I couldn't find your contact details anywhere, so if you could email me at lucy@all-leo.com that would be brilliant!
Thanks,
Lucy