Poetry legend John Cooper Clarke was on the BBC this morning (Radio 4) - back out there performing regularly, after years of silence. This is very good news. Clarke is a major talent and an influence on witty performance-interested poets like Luke Wright and Tim Wells today. A dream: to have him appear for the Oxfam series. I am working on it.
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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Thousands turned up to watch him at the Latitude poetry tent, all standing, crammed together with the front row dry humping the stage.
Luckily, he only turned up twenty minutes late this time and Luke Wright and Byron Vincent were on hand to keep the hordes entertained.
It was a magic night for poetry, preceded by the obligatory backstage chorus of "Where the f*** is he?"