Is there anything better than sun? Not the sun, mind, but sun, singular. Sun. As in getting, taking, catching. Today was sunny in London. Fully and completely sunny. 22 Celsius. That is almost miraculous - a barbecue Spring moment of extreme grace. I sat out in both the back and front of my flat, following sun. I read some Hazlitt, on Familiar Style, the new Adrienne Rich, some Jessie L. Weston (she has a marvellous style!), and ended with some April poems from David Lehman's delightful The Evening Sun. I also read some newspapers, and other books, one on rhetoric, but leave that for another day. I sometimes wore my UEA ballcap - but mostly I am red-faced for the seeking of the very highest good: sun.
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. What do I mean by smart?
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