Want to feel old? It is the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia - which, among other things, is proof of a poet's existence in the 21st century (don't believe me? - Google and see how many poets are listed there - know any to request the pages be taken down?). Meanwhile, The Simpsons first aired on this day in 1990 - 21 years ago. If proof was ever needed that zany, post-modern, and cutting edge American culture has long since gone so mainstream as to render the very idea of post-modern pop culture toothless, well, look no further than this show. I turn 45 this year (in April), and am now on the verge of (if not already tumbled over into) what is surely "middle age". I was 20 (that sublime age) 25 years ago - in other words, a quarter of a century ago, and no matter if I wear jeans, runners, and baseball caps, I cannot hold back time. We are no longer young - even those of us so embedded in, penetrated by, dazzled with, and intermediated via, new media and whizz-bang-savvy stuff. What's next? Surely not another 9 years of Bart and Homer?
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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