Travis Elborough, Caleb Klaces, and David Shook at the Albion Beatnik, Walton St., Oxford. April 26, 2013. Doors at 7.30 PM, readings begin at 8.00 PM. Travis Elborough, "the hipster Bill Bryson," reads from and spins records related to his critically acclaimed new book, The London Bridge in America. Oxonian Caleb Klaces reads from his Melita Hume Prize-winning debut Bottled Air, from Eyewear Publishing. David Shook reads from and plays whimsical Mexican records related to his debut collection Our Obsidian Tongues, also from Eyewear Publishing. Host Jenny Lewis, Oxford Poet and Oxford University tutor, introduces readers.
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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