Sad news. The rebel with a self-destructive streak, some-time actor and artist and director Dennis Hopper has died of cancer in his 70s. Notable for directing Easy Rider, the breakthrough Hollywood film of its time, as well as for co-starring with James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, Hopper later put in bizarre and unforgettable performances as a character actor in several off-kilter movies, including Apocalypse Now and Blue Velvet. He had an unexpected return in the big-budget Speed, as the lunatic bomber. Hopper's role in Lynch's classic will remain his signature performance, perhaps the most vile, upsetting and original portrayal of sexual evil ever put onto US celluloid. He managed to both fail endlessly in his life and career and remain a freewheeling icon of a somewhat faded ideal of American hedonism and freedom.
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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