Today's Guardian mentions a study that shows that only 3 of the top 100 singles this year were in the rock and roll category. Hip hop and Dance and Pop are the new kings. Most rock stars are in their 50s, 60s or older, and few young Turks are on the way up with anything like the same levels of support or fanbase of their elders. One commentator suggests rock and roll is as dead as Jazz. What does this mean for performance poetry in the UK, which saw itself as a new kind of "rock and roll"? Clearly, rap is, as David Brent noted in one episode of The Office, "the new Wordsworth", but where does that leave contemporary mainstream poetry? It seems hard enough to imagine ever being as popular as Elvis Costello, let alone hearing his genre is going the way of the Dodo too... or is that Dido?
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....
Comments
I remember reading the Poetry Review's 'New Generation Poets' of 1994. The overarching theme was that 'poetry is the new rock and roll'. It never really happened and, in fact, sales of contemporary poetry declined sharply soon afterwards. I have noticed however that all of the poets featured have gone on to fame if not fortune as a direct result of their inclusion.
Best wishes from Simon