The jazz singer Natalie Williams is the daughter of poet
John Hartley Williams. They have performed jazz and poetry events together in
the London area
and in Berlin .
One Sunday a month Natalie holds a monthly rave-up at Ronnie Scott’s club in London , called Soul
Family. Otherwise she is often to be heard fronting the brilliant Ronnie Scott
house band (extraordinary James Pearson on piano) and the latest news is that
they have just put out a CD called Jazz Classics (it’s on the Ronnie Scott
label). There is more vigour and kick in these live performances than you’ll
hear almost anywhere else these days. Check it out!
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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