Smiley Culture, a significant black British musician and cultural figure, died at his home in police custody recently. Despite there being four officers in his home, and his being under arrest, he apparently picked up a kitchen knife and stabbed himself once in the heart, fatally. As he lay dying (this is undisputed) he was handcuffed. Despite Smiley Culture's family hiring a superb pathologist, the police have refused to take this matter further, according to today's Guardian, for the chilling reason that the four officers are "witnesses" and not suspects - so they cannot be compelled to make any statements. None of them has described the events surrounding this sudden apparent suicide, let alone coherently. They have simply refused. I once called the police and had them come to my home, and I was treated with civility and great professionalism, and I don't want to cast aspersions. However, there is something awfully worrying about a situation where police can do anything they want to to you in your own house, and then, because they are police, not have to testify as to what happened, even if they walk in to talk to you, and leave with you dead. That is a culture of dread.
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....
Comments
As I have got older, my respect for the British police has grown. It is a dirty, difficult and dangerous job that I personally would not want to do. Like you, we have needed the police on several occasions in the past and have always found them helpful, courteous and professional. Incidentally, the fact that there were four officers present makes it exceedingly unlikely that Smiley was murdered.
Best wishes from Simon