Typos - beauty mark or cancer on the face of our poetry collections? What poet does not turn to their poem, their bio, in a journal, to see if it has been blighted? What book, no matter how carefully screened, vetted, pruned, pried at, inspected, and glowered upon, does not seem to smuggle in a typo, or two? Like bedbugs - where do they come from? Something there is in language that does not love perfection - or at least, in type-setting. Even with a slew of eyes on the text, they come in, unwanted visitors, stowaways, thieves of our ideals, mocking us, belittling the book. Or, should they be read as delightful imps, welcome scallywags? Reminders of our flaws, modest interlopers, gadflies of marring benevolence? Either way, what you print is not always what you get, or what you wanted is not always what's inscribed. Eyewear is riddled with them, so is the wider world. Let's dunce.
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?
Comments
The other reason, I'm afraid, is that too many poets and editors these days don't know "it's" from "its", and similar potential errors, in the first place...
The surprising thing is how often a typo actually improves a poem! I agree with Sheenagh. I think it's (correct, Sheenagh?) sometimes the subconscious mind endeavouring to have the last word.
Best wishes from Simon