Been reading Lachlan Mackinnon's new Faber collection, Small Hours. A very fine long prose sequence in the second half, which is reminiscent of Life Studies Lowell, but with a very English spin. Stephen Morrissey's Girouard Avenue from Coracle press also has something of the memoir to it, this time of Montreal - moving, serious poetry by a Canadian poet worth getting to know. Also, been enjoying Cure for a Crooked Smile, by Chris Kinsey, from Ragged Raven. Kinsey is always a surprising and sensitive poet, and she was a BBC Wildlife Poet of the year recently. She writes particularly well about the animal kingdom. Yeshiva Boys, by David Lehman, is superb - third (or is that fourth?) generation New York School poetry, that twists and turns linguistically, with verve and style - creating a slightly more humane kind of Bernsteinesque Language Poetry - but just as formally and humorously attuned. Lehman will be reading for Oxfam in the London series, March 1st, with Mark Ford, more about that next month.
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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