Sidney Lumet, one of my favourite directors, has died. His greatest film was his first - 12 Angry Men - but unlike Welles, who also faced that challenge, he went on to direct more than 39 other feature films, many of them classics. I think my favourites are his great 70s gritty cop films with a young Pacino - Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico. Fanously, he directed his last film at age 83, and it wasn't half-bad. Other classics include The Pawnbroker, Network, and The Verdict. So far, that's by my count six of the greatest American films. Throw in Murder on the Orient Express, Fail-Safe, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Deathtrap, and you have a very impressive list. He 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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