As The Guardian observes today, Joe Mantell, sadly, has died. As they also note, for a little-known character actor, he got to say some very famous movie lines. Arguably, his "forget it Jake, it's Chinatown" is the greatest last line of any film, barring perhaps "I am having an old friend for dinner" and "Nobody's perfect", so he was lucky - but also talented, he imbued that brief sentiment with so much ambiguous darkness it carries a whole social vision of hell on earth with it.
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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