Sad news. One of the greatest of contemporary fashion designers, Alexander McQueen, has been found dead at his home in London.
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....
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A bit of additional sad news: Poets in North London and elsewhere have been mourning the deaths, within days of each other, of Phil Poole and John Rety. Phil was ill for a number of months and has written a wonderful collection of poems that will be published posthumously next week. Phil was a lovely man, a talented sculptor as well as a poet, with a delightful skewed sense of humour.
John died very suddenly of a heart attack. As you may know, he ran the Torriano Meeting House with his partner, Susan Johns, for 23 years, and also the publishing house, Hearing Eye. He had a huge, complex, extraordinary personality. His life was truly dedicated to peace and poetry, and I very much miss him.
All good wishes,
Leah