Interesting. The British poetry blogosphere seems about as divided as Scotland currently. I'd say it's about 48% Yes and 52% No to the Next Generation list. Some poets, like Ben Wilkinson, are happily ransacking their career best reviews for prestigious journals, and featuring the listed great and good; Charlotte Runcie in the Daily Telegraph (online and beyond) is questioning the inclusion of famous stars like Daljit Nagra; and then it gets increasingly bitter. Perhaps too obviously, approval breaks down to collegiality - the more people know others on the list, professionally, the less likely they are to set fire to 20 bridges at once. The excluded marginalised and genuinely cheated, feeling little to lose, are more vocally critical. The teeny size of the UK scene makes it hard to get an objective response from so close up. I've weighed in already. See below. But I think anyone who applauds the list entirely, and doesn't try to problematize it at all, is probably guilty of a bit of jingoism or curious joy, since there are clearly key figures - a few of genius - left off (James Byrne, Sandeep Parmar, Ahren Warner, Rachael Boast, Jon Stone, James Brookes, Sarah Jackson, Kathryn Simmonds, Sam Riviere, Zoe Brigley, Frances Leviston, etc) whose absence makes the presence of super stars in their late 40s or beyond, who don't need the list's boost, slightly discomfiting. It seems the Next Gen title is misleading. But as I said myself, 50% of those on the list deserve to be there, at least. How's that for fence sitting? Okay, here is something more frank: not all 20 on the current list are poetic geniuses. Some named above are.
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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