I read yesterday for The Kingston Readers' Festival - a wonderful initiative run by Sandra Williams - with the poet and writer Chrissie Gittins, in a good venue - The Kingston Museum. Though the audience was not large (around 20 students and older members of the local community) it was attentive and genuinely engaged, and I sold a half-dozen books or so, which, as any poet will know, is not so bad. Gittins is a very good reader, and she read from her children's and adult collections. Her latest for kids is The Humpback's Wail, and I recommend it, for its charming illustrations by Paul Bommer, and the poems themselves. I have suggested to Gittins that she send her work to Mike Kavangh's increasingly impressive magazine of young person's poetry, The Scrumbler. Worth subscribing to, and writing poems for.
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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