Sad news, the American-born Canadian character actor Maury Chaykin has died. His mother was Canadian, and he gravitated to Toronto in the 1970s, making his name as an ACTRA stalwart in any number of TV shows and films. By 1990 he was making it into major movies, and at the end of his career, and life, was recognisable to a whole new audience for being on the popular Entourage. Chaykin was physically striking, and unruly or slovenly, able to skew bad or simply schmuck as the script demanded - indeed, he was one of the great character actors of the last few decades. Gifted with a superb voice and presence, he often stole the show. He will be much missed.
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....
Comments