I had one of the best poetry experiences of my life last night when I attended Declan Ryan's cutting-edge poetry series in Hoxton, East London, Days of Roses. Set currently in a hyper-cool if-small basement bar (With Lee Scratch Perry posters, red walls, a cavernous series of little snug rooms, and a great DJ), the series is pulling in the elite of the younger set of British poets. I read with Sam Riviere, Jon Stone, Kate Potts, and Katrina Naomi last night (among others) - a very good line-up, indeed. Ryan is himself a fine serious younger poet, and a personable host. The audience, jampacked in, stood attentively over the two hour event (with breaks of course) and really got into the poems. The vibe was very friendly, cultured but also hip. If this is the coming generation, it is a great sign indeed. Riviere has a forthcoming pamphlet, Faber New Poets 7; Stone's new pamphlet is SCAREcrows; and Naomi's is Charlotte Bronte's Corset (she was the writer-in-res at the Bronte Museum). Looking forward to reading them all. I enjoyed finally meeting Stone in person, after his many comments online. He's a charming, intelligent young man, who dresses in a spiffy, dapper way, and his highly-verbose and complex poetry is erudite and entertaining.
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?
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