Excellent news. This year's Costa winner, Christopher Reid, will be reading for the Oxfam series in London on July 8. He will be joined by a few international guests (Paul Perry- Ireland; Sina Queyras - Canada; John Monagahan - USA) and some younger poets who will read short sets, including Declan Ryan and Rachel Lehrman and Sam Riviere. More about this closer to the time. To reserve a seat contact the Oxfam Marylebone shop, and ask for manager Martin Penny.
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?
Comments