It has been a bad last few days for brilliant octogenarian writers and poets of Britain - first Peter Porter, now the legendary Alan Sillitoe, has died. I find this very sad news indeed. Sillitoe is one of the truly iconic voices of British writing of the post-war period, and his books and screenplays, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, are classics of the Kitchen Sink manner. I had a most memorable dinner and drinks with Mr. Sillitoe at the Groucho Club a few years ago, and he was charming, funny, smart and slightly grouchy. He had lots to say and great stories to tell. He'd lived in Morocco with Tennessee Williams and knew Sylvia Plath. He was a smoking advocate. He was an Angry Young Man who didn't like the term. He was a famous novelist for more than fifty years, and a good poet whose prose overshadowed that side of his writing. Sillitoe is survived by his wife, the important American-British poet, Ruth Fainlight. He will be missed.
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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