Last night BBC 2 aired a 50-minute dramatisation of Christopher Reid's magnificent long poem, "The Song of Lunch", which I think takes its place now, beside "The Rape of the Lock" as vers de societe classic. Reid is part of a generation of major English poets who have somehow been sidelined by the NextGen - so that James Fenton, Craig Raine, Charles Boyle are, though of course widely-known, somehow not treated with the kid gloves afforded to Kid Armitage and Sundance Duffy. Well, Reid is tops in my book. The production was marvellous,sad and very funny, and superbly well-acted, though Rickman seemed perhaps overly-distracted, and Emma's neck was not as long as in the poem. It made me think the whole thing was a reverie, whereas in the text, it seems more vividly nightmarish - the lunch is happening, the crisis is real. I am not sure the fellow cast as the original owner of the bistro was funereal enough; and the Eliot-look-alike was too fat and short. Also, would an editor in Bloomsbury real get blotto on one grappa and two bottles of plonk, having consumed a starter, a bit of pizza and a few breadsticks? Likely not. Still, the sadness of time was perfectly portrayed. This proves poems can work on TV. Bring them on!
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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best wishes
martine
You're joking, right? Anyone would be drunk on that lot, whatever they'd eaten - certainly over the driving limit!