Sad news. A super screenwriter, Tom Mankiewicz, has died. He wrote the screenplay for Eyewear's favourite Bond, Diamonds Are Forever, as well as Live and Let Die, and several others. He also created and directed the kitsch classic TV series Hart to Hart. Mankiewicz was related to the writers of Citizen Kane, and All About Eve, and as a script doctor became legendary in Hollywood, salvaging, for instance, Mario Puzo's Superman script. He will be 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. What do I mean by smart?
Comments