Sad news for a leap year. February 29 2012 sees the announcement of the death of Davy Jones. The Monkees started in 1966, the same year I was born, and though dubbed The Prefab Four, had a pop genius second to none (well, okay, second to The Beatles). A few of their classics, like 'I'm A Believer', 'Last Train To Clarkesville', 'I'm Not Your Stepping Stone' and the wonderful, zany theme song, are among the Sixties best hits. Oddly, he has died at the age of 66.
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....
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