I have been a member of a gym for about a year now, and see a personal trainer from time to time. I run, swim, lift weights, and stretch, three to four times a week. And, due to genes, a love of food, and some medicine I need to take, I am still about ten kilos over the suggested weight for a man my age (46). Then again, having neither won nor lost Lee Child's lottery of life (I am exactly medium height, at 5-9, neither short nor tall), and being a middle-aged man, most of the excess baggage appears around my midriff. This has got me so down it was beginning to look up to me, and then the other day - zap! - I had a thought. Who hates me this way, other than me? I am loved by wife, and friends. More vitally, some of the best guys ever, guys I loved, were love-handled or even fat - Orson Welles, Dylan Thomas, and Babe Ruth spring to mind. Wallace Stevens, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Diego Rivera - all had a bad BMI. If being a chubby hubby was okay for them, why not me? I feel reborn. I will still exercise, I will still try to control my poor nutrition, but I will also try to enjoy looking like a southern hick cop chewing a toothpick, hoisting his belt, letting his manly flesh roll over, as it does, as it can and should.
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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