Also in The Sunday Times - news of a mass email and social networking campaign to arrange a vote of the members of the Poetry Society. Everyone has agreed not to talk to the media, including Dr Fiona Sampson (this year's Ruth Padel, according to the catty Times). Sadly, British media only like it when poets are fighting like wrestlers in mud. Eyewear is maintaining neutrality in this apparent power struggle, because frankly, Mr. Shankly, what is it about? No one has publicly said what direction Sampson wants to go in that the outgoing president didn't. I liked the editing of Poetry Review, so saw little problem there, though some of those Paterson essays were a bit tough to follow.
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?
Comments