It is fitting that the obituary of Chris Haney, a Canadian inventor of the world's greatest board game since Monopoly and Scrabble - Trivial Pursuit - has been published on Canada Day, in the Guardian. Haney helped to invent the game in my home town of Montreal, when a journalist at The Gazette. As a paperboy I used to deliver The Gazette, and still recall that most memorable of headlines, first glimpsed groggily at the crack of dawn some summer day thirty years ago: BOY MEETS HERO AT BOTTOM OF POOL. No Canadian cottage or dinner party was complete without TP - which for awhile, with its pie pieces - seemed to be more popular than TV. I had an Uncle, Ed, who memorised all the cards, and therefore could win the game on his first round, which was annoying. He has since died, tragically.
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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