Sad news. A great musician has died. The Guardian ran the obituary today of Ska and rock-steady legend, Lynn Taitt, who moved to Canada in the late 60s and found himself, among other things, playing in my brother's Ska revival band, The Kingpins, in the last few decades of his life. Coming as this does almost to the week of the 30th anniversary of The Specials' first Number One in the UK, it's a reminder of the enduring appeal and quality of this great music and its various styles.
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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