Hats off to poet Christoper Reid for his recently-announced win of a Costa prize for best poetry collection of the year. A Scattering is a powerful elegiac book, comparable to the work of Hardy and Douglas Dunn, who also wrote of the remembered loss of their wives. It is good- in a year that has seen a newer generation seemingly seize the reigns in the UK poetry firmament- to see an elder statesman of poetry, whose work came into prominence in the 70s and 80s as a so-called Martian- get a look in.
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....
Comments
Christopher Reid is hardly a poetry outsider. He was poetry editor of Faber & Faber during the 1990's and rejected my own work on several occasions. However I am not one to bear grudges and intend to buy a copy of his book as soon as I can afford it.
Best wishes from Simon