Salt does not have the monopoly on financial concerns, or on being a lively small press doing great work - Salmon in Ireland - among other things the main Irish publisher of woman's poetry there - is also seeking supporters (albeit more subtly) to purchase their superb collections and anthologies. Their offer is fair and tempting - they will ship books anywhere in the world for free. Now is the time for North Americans, among others, to order books by Kevin Higgins, Patrick Chapman, Susan M DuMars, and many others - including my Seaway - without the expense of post from abroad. The salmon of knowledge is ever more available.
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