Sad news. The great B-movie cult figure, Japanese-American actress-dancer Tura Satana, has died. Satana, who inspired the Kill Bill! films, was best-known for her tight-costumed pneumatic psychopath in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, perhaps the ne plus ultra of camp schlock movie making (sexploitation). She also dated celebrities like Elvis and Sinatra, before her career took off. Later, she abandoned her bizarre and novel mix of martial arts and burlesque, and settled down to a series of Joe jobs, but was always a fan favourite. She will not be forgotten.
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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