It is hard being a British librarian. One has to lend, as often as not, mediocre rubbish to semi-literate readers who prefer pap to Pope. The year's most borrowed listings are out, and reveal a top 100 riddled with pulp fiction too bland even to deserve that B-side accolade. The top poetry book? Well it comes from faux-genius S. Fry, who is neither a poet or a critic, but a celebrity whose main message is to argue against vers libre, 100 years too late. In fiction, it is an American crime writer who has a Fordist production line to pump out his books so cheap they should be recalled as unsafe at any speed of reading. Literacy is so often extolled as a virtue that we often forget that reading badly can also mean reading unwisely. At least they only borrow bad books and not buy them.
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
My mother was a librarian and she was always dismayed by the public's lack of literary taste. I very nearly bought Fry's 'The Ode Less Travelled' in a Waterstone's '3 for 2' deal. As I was walking up to the cash desk to pay I spotted another book I wanted to read more (at the time) and replaced the Fry. It's a decision I have always regretted. I must lay my hands on a copy sometime.
Best wishes from Simon
Happily, I am not foolish enough to think I know what other people ought to be reading. Nor am I so steeped in my own superiority that I imagine millions of people worldwide are making some kind of calamitous mistake by buying and borrowing these books. We can't all enjoy tofu and rice wine. Some of us just want a pie and a pint, and such choices are entirely up to us.
Poetry only appeals to the few. Thank goodness. Let's keep it that way. And books that do what they say on the tin are invaluable. Hurray for genre fiction!