Kingston University is sponsoring the Oxfam reading series in Marylebone this autumn and winter. So far we have scheduled three excellent evenings, on September 29, November 18 and December 1, 2010, featuring, poets Charles Boyle, Jen Hadfield, John Glenday, Adam Foulds, Anthony Thwaite, Helen Oswald, Anna Smaill, Evan Jones, Michelle Boisseau, Dante Micheaux, Eric Ormsby, George Elliot Clarke, Carole Baldock, Barbara Smith, Sheila Hillier, and others. More details soon. You can always call or email Martin Penny if you want to reserve in advance.
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?
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