Great news - the excellent British poet Emily Berry (Dear Boy, Faber 2013) will be judging our third year of the Melita Hume Poetry Prize for the best debut (unpublished) poetry collection by a poet based in the UK, aged 35 or younger at the time of entry - minimum of 45 pages of poetry. She follows judges for 2012 and 2013, Tim Dooley and Jon Stone. The Prize is a thousand pounds, and publication in May 2015 with Eyewear Publishing Ltd! Poets can enter as of January 1 up to the closing deadline of March 31st. Winner to be announced in May, 2014. We will have more details up soon, with the submission form.
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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