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?
Penny Boxall was born in 1987 in Surrey. She graduated in
2009 from UEA with an MA with distinction in Creative Writing (Poetry). Her
poetry has appeared in The Salt Book of
Younger Poets, Mslexia, The Rialto and Tate
etc. She has been shortlisted for an Eric Gregory Award. In 2010 she won the Frederick van Eeden poetry competition.
Her poems have come third in Segora, highly commended in the Museum of London
competition, and runner-up in the 2011 Mslexia
competition. Formerly the Literature intern at The Wordsworth Trust, she now
works in Oxford.
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