David Wheatley, a leading Irish critic-poet of his generation (those born in the 70s), is one of the poets selected to appear in the latest - and from the looks of it, invaluable (or at least intriguingly copious) - anthology of "modern" Irish poetry to appear. Cynics might say these anthologies are as regular as "bloody buses" - but then again, if anthologies usefully update and revise canonical thinking, each one subtly or not so subtly, shifting the relations between poems, then, the more the merrier. Eyewear looks forward to reading this one, edited by Wes Davis.
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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