Stendhal spoke of love as a crystallization. It is also hard work. At first, the mad euphoria, the lighter than air mania, of it, is amazing - the blood is afire with zesty, biting potentiality, and the idea of the loved one is fixed in the imagination, making all else in life dull and secondary or tertiary in comparison; soon enough, reality rears its ugly head - and love, to be realised must be based on more solid plinths. It needs a rock. Blogs are like that too. Eyewear reached quite a peak a few seconds ago, with its 2,500th post. Over time, the initial love-stage, the infatuation, has worn off. Disillusionment set in. Hard work ensued. Here I am, faced with this corpus of digital ephemera, read by thousands each day. I do not exactly look on this work and despair, but nor do I swoon. How I miss the happy glad days of folly, of mad love. What a high!
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
As you say, thousands of people are reading your blog every week and I think that you have definitely made a difference in prising the British Poetry Establishment open a minute crack. To prise it open properly, of course, you would probably need some weapons of mass destruction!
Best wishes from Simon
I have been following your blog since it started, around the time I was booted off poem.uk for disruptive written behaviour, and then moved to poets on fire, until I was ejected from there for contravening the talk policy, before migrating to the poetry threads on the Guardian, until I was banned from there after several years, once I'd backed myself into a corner when I ended up writing some of the most dire and transparently bitter mad-dog-shite of my time thus far.
I noticed around a year ago that the first flush of social media internet exchange had died off. Poets on fire won the forum wars in the UK, its membership increasing exponentially like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more poets who joined, the more felt they had to be a member there in order to be a part of the UK mainstream poetry community, with the irony being that the 'debate' slowed to a trickle and is now, to all intent and purpose, dead altogether. People also seem to have woken up to Facebook, realising that, far from it being a cool place to share the hard won poetry knowledge we all seek, it's merely a mass personal information gathering site for corporate America, where people volunteer all their private details that are then used to make money for others.
Silence seems to be the new conversation. It's cool to say little rather than spamming your 10,000 hours to reach the oneself within we all seek to speak as. The entire global English poetry world has gone the same way. The Poetry Foundation closed the gates to open debate, then Silliman, and now the conversation has shifted to tweeted one liners, smileys and 'like' buttons as the primary means of poetic communication.
But not you. You are the one who 'won', for want of a more appropriate term, the competition to get an online audience. You are a class act, unafraid to take chances and appear foolish. You don't mind writing the odd clanger that the silent and fearful conversationalists, who constitute the online majority, would never dare to for fear of looking daft, or rather, what other people saying nothing, might think of them. But in the long run we all know, that's the way to do it. Be yourself and by doing so, stand out from the crowd, as you do. A top talker.
Cheers.