Several key art books of the last four of five years, such as by Richard Myer (MIT, 2013) have revolved around the question of contemporaneity, and what, precisely, it means, to be a contemporary artist. In the new global art world, the term "contemporary" has, to a serious extent, replaced the terms conceptual, or post-modern. It seems the poetry world (to label a thing which may not, yet, exist) has yet to embrace the label contemporary in quite the same way. Eyewear the blog will be asking, in 2014, just what contemporary poetry is, or was...
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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