Howard Jacobson has just won this year's Man Booker Prize - hats off to him. I am sort of glad he pipped the expected winner, C, to the post, because C was a semi-unreadable pastiche of modernism (post-modernism_ about semi-conductors, etc, that couldn't get its horticulture right. Cue famous quip. Uncue. Jacobson got a lot of press this week in many papers, bemoaning the state of the serious UK novel, and he is right, to a point, but don't tell me Waugh, Amis and Wodehouse are not revered, in their own way. His argument on the BBC this morning that novels should always be funny (read a poem he said, if you want seriousness!) rings hollow. Comedy as an element in all great works of literature: absolutely! But should the default position of any form or genre be one tone, one vision? I am not so sure. Tragi-comic, seems the way to go. Best of both words.
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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