Poetry Review Volume 100: 2 Summer 2010 is out, with poems from Alfred Corn, Ruth Fainlight, Alan Jenkins, John Kinsella, Sarah Maguire, Chris McCabe, Daljit Nagra, myself, and others. Also, a few good articles on slam poetry. Having been involved with bringing slam poetry to Canada fifteen years ago (in the summer of 1994 I believe) via the nationally-infamous cabaret nights of Vox Hunt, that led to YAWP! and the emergence of an entire slam domination in Montreal of the art form, for a few years, I then anthologised slam poets and poems alongside major page poets like Glyn Maxwell, Michael Donaghy, and others, calling the new wave of poets that read well on and off the page Fusion Poets, with co-editor Regie Cabico, when we put out the 1998 anthology Poetry Nation. Good to see the British finally taking to their own indigenous slam artists, and welcoming them in, off the stage, onto the page. Meanwhile, my own working practice has moved on, and I collaborate far less with rap artists and musicians, as I used to do at Club di Salvio (origin of Bran Van 3000 - and I may be the Todd of "Drinking in LA", or not) - these days I am, I suppose, a lover of high modernist formal practice, and the lyric, disrupted more, or less. The page rules the head, the stage the heart. The eyes may have it. But a voice can still win the day.
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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