Oh dear, another one of those days - Remembrance Day 2011 will be another, as was January 1st, 2001, when all the numbers align. At ten past ten this morning it would have been even cooler. What are these days called? Why are they not floating festivals, or moments for mass carnivals to erupt, where all order is inverted, and mayhem rules? As luck would have it, I will be guest blogger over at The Best American Poetry blog this week, starting today. So don't expect to see so much of me over here, until next Sunday. Pip pip.
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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