Sad news. The legendary film director Blake Edwards has died. He was 88. Edwards had a huge impact on popular culture, for roughly two decades, between 1961 and 1981, starting with his classic, best-beloved Breakfast At Tiffany's, and ending his run of hits with Victor Victoria. Between them came the hilarious quasi-racist The Party, and other Sellers hits, featuring the Pink Panther Theme, as well as infamous sex romp, 10. His last works were mediocre. In fact, much of his work was, and often a little of its time (one thinks of the Chinese caricature of Mickey Rooney), but at his best, he was a sort of emblem of the hedonistic zeitgeist. For his Capote adaptation, and the Sellers farces alone, he will last.
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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