There are dozens of books you no doubt want to read, or should read, from Rexroth's One Hundred Poems From The Japanese to Lee Child's Nothing To Lose. So be it, that's what summer is for. Do it your way. Enjoy the unlimited stretch of the open read. But if you hanker after something utterly important for an understanding of The British Poetry Revival, as it was called, edited by a brilliant poetry critic, then do get the indispensable Andrew Crozier Reader. It's something I have been dipping into of late, and will be again. I think it's a book we all need to own and get to know. Toss into that list of books for the smart beach The Restructure by Chris McCabe, Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poets, and Tales of the Buckman Tavern by Ben Mazer, one of the most dizzyingly prolific and flamboyant American stylists of the moment, a dardevil mix of Delmore Schwartz and David Gascoyne. I have been thoroughly enjoying the new Donald McGrath book, The Port Inventory, one of the finest collections by a Canadian in recent memory, in terms of wit and emotive precision, observed detail and storytelling brio.
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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