Congrats to Karen Solie, fast becoming a fixture on the Canadian poetry scene, for her Griffin win. Also, hats off to an Irish poet, who also won. Maybe next time, the paper this links to can feature the International winner's photo instead - or is this the new Olympic Spirit of Grab That Podium or whatever that already-forgotten slogan was from those Winter Olympics? Seriously, 130,000 Canadian dollars is a lot to fork out on two poets, and hopefully over time this prize will lead to people actually reading Canadian poetry somewhere beyond our borders, with anything approaching the love and enthusiasm they show for Scottish and Irish and Australian poets. Canada is becoming a cool place, eh? Now David Cameron wants to borrow our vicious cost-cutting methods from the Chretien years. Will he start speaking in that funny way too?
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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