Within minutes of posting a message about a poetry issue in the UK, I was inundated with nasty personal messages. One poet said she was "disgusted" by me. Goodness, and I was only recommending we try and get along. Apparently, poets are not immune to the dangerous attractions of instant messaging and the Internet. But, as I have said before, we need to be good to each other, and to try to reign in the ad hominem attacks. I can only imagine what it would be like to be one of the offenders in this whole PoSoc debacle, if a mere bystander can get so spammed and reviled. This is why I have removed the earlier posts on the matter from this week. I have no wish to continue being a part of this. There are enough parties on both sides to handle it at this stage.
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
You really need to take a leaf out of my my book and avoid other poets like the proverbial plague. I know from bitter personal experience that a significant minority of them are seriously unbalanced!
Best wishes from Simon
Why is someone saying they're disgusted by you anything other than tit for tat? I'm not disgusted by you but be fair.
Jessica, Dennis and Simon - this is, sad to say, a very important and difficult issue, which a lot of reasonable, fair-minded people have weighed in on. It's not a spat where everyone has lost control and it's not a witch-hunt. It's very easy to sit back and say, "Oh, let's avoid all the nonsense or laugh at the bickering poets", but I'm afraid to say it's not the reasonable or fair response. Fortunately, there are some very reliable and decent people working very hard - on both the inside and outside - to get this mess sorted out.
Spoken like a true gentleman--let the rabble drag themselves even deeper into the morass!
Not sure that's a material distinction, Todd. Anyone saying they're disgusted with you necessarily means they're disgusted with something you've done or said, ie. your behaviour. They don't literally mean they're disgusted by, say, your entire being or your state of existence - that would be rather odd!
So the way I see it, you said you were disgusted by a collective behaviour and someone has retorted and said they're disgusted by your behaviour. The only real difference is that your disgust was with actions taken by a broad swathe of people, rather than an individual.
I think the best way you can put it is to say that you felt the poster attacking you was intending to be hurtful, whereas you were intending to defend someone. Without seeing that poster's message, I couldn't say whether that was right or wrong.