This in from the Poetry School: "Fiona Moore and Abi Parry are
the two talented people picked from an immensely competitive field to become our
two new developing editors. They will work closely with Poetry School staff and
Michael Mackmin at The Rialto on a programme designed to explore the
practicalities and philosophies of poetry editing, culminating in their editing
a section of the magazine. Fiona has just published a pamphlet with Happenstance
called The Only Reason for Time, and Abi is a Gregory winner who is
working on her first collection."
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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