PN Review - one of the great poetry magazines in the English language - has reached
its 200th number. Eyewear says hats off to them! In 1973 W.L. Webb noted their debut in the Guardian, in particular the magazine’s ‘elevated stroppiness
of tone and a sense of breaking new ground that I haven't come across for some
time'. They have survived a lot, including the Manchester bomb of 1996, and made marks along the way with, for example, PNR 13, Crisis for
Cranmer and King James which got them in trouble with the Commons. I found it a great resource for my PhD research on FT Prince, and other poets of the 1940s. While I don't always agree with the tone and tenor of all the critical judgements made in its pages, there is a serious, dignified and utterly committed approach to modern and contemporary poetry that remains unmatched elsewhere in the UK. The new milestone issue, PNR 200 is for July/August 2011. Like every PNR it includes an editorial, letters, news
and notes, reports, poems and translations, interviews, essays and reviews. It
introduces new poets and celebrates those already on their way. The complete
on-line archive is accessible at www.pnreview.co.uk. I can't wait to get my copy.
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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