Sad news. The 20th century Polish composer Gorecki has died. At first an obscure modernist, he became an unlikely "star" in the popular realm when his "symphony of sorrowful songs" stopped traffic in Los Angeles and was a world-wide phenomenon of the early 90s. It seems hard to believe this haunting, deeply spiritual and humanist work should have been famous for 18 years, when it seems like yesterday when I first heard it, at the age of 26. I was deeply moved - no surprise there. The promised "new age" of spiritual wisdom never materialised, instead we had the Balkan wars, and then the "clash of civilisations" marked by 9/11. The music continues to transcend its moments, though, and while Gorecki never completed another work of universal acclaim, he remains a key cultural figure of the pre-millenium period, and the creator of the darkest, most sublime piece of music created in the post-Holocaust era.
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....
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