This week (December 3rd) marked the 50th birthday of actor Darryl Hannah, who among many other roles played the replicant Pris in Ridley Scott's 1982 future noir movie, Blade Runner. Pris is a "basic pleasure model", designed as, essentially, a robot prostitute for the Off-World colonies. Cursed with a four year lifespan, and born on Valentine's Day, just a few years before the movie takes place. Memorably, she disguises herself as a doll - spraying raccoon make-up markings across her eyes, veiling her face and sitting very, very still - before launching herself at Harrison Ford's replicant-hunter and clamping her thighs around his neck. This photo is from a series of portraits by Dr Will Brooker, as a tribute to Pris' 2019 style. The model is Laura-Jade. Happy birthday, Ms Hannah.
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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