Heather Brett and Noel Monahan - poet-editors - have been working on Windows Publications, from Ireland, for 20 years now, and have now published a celebration of this two-decades of effort to support local and wider poetry. Such work is usually thankless, so I thank them here. And note the anthology is worth buying, to support their work, and to read some very good recent poems by Irish poets known and new (perhaps) to you. I am in the book, I should add, which is lovely; many others too, including Paul Perry, Patrick Chapman, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Nessa O'Mahony, Pat Boran, Leland Bardwell and Medbh McGuckian.
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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