Sad news to start 2011. Major British actor and activist, Pete Postlethwaite, has died. Although a TV and stage actor beforehand, he became world famous 18 years ago, in 1993, when he appeared in In The Name of the Father, the role which got him Oscar-nominated for a profoundly-moving part. He then cemented his position as one of the most astonishing and refreshing new onscreen faces of the Nineties, with great parts in big crowd-pleasers The Usual Suspects and Romeo + Juliet. He also marched against the war in Iraq. He also appeared in several big-budget sci-fi/horror flicks, like The Lost World (a Spielberg sequel), The Omen (remake), and a top film of 2010, Inception. He could pull off any role and make any movie he was in cooler and yet more authentic by his presence, which screamed nonchalant-gritty integrity. No one looked or acted like Postlethwaite - he was a great original and will be much missed.
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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