So many people die, it is often hard to keep track. Two lesser-known figures in popular culture were recently the subject of obituaries in The Guardian: Michael Gough and Mark Tulin. I met Gough once years ago after a play in London - he was very kind. I knew him best from Brideshead Revisited and, later, the Batman films. Mark Tulin was the bass player for the greatest American garage band of the 60s, The Electric Prunes, one of my favourite bands. They heavily influenced some of the music my brother later played, in Montreal, as a bass player in the 1990s. Both talented men will be 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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