Cleverness belongs to everybody (unless one is born an idiot). Wisdom, less.
erminia
> Jon Corelis wrote:
>
> > Cleverness is a technique, which can be well or poorly used like any
> >other technique.
>
>
> What a very odd thing to say, Jon--as if intelligence itself were
> a "technique" to be acquired by training or practice. But maybe you
> mean something along the lines of "street smarts" and other kinds of
> applied intelligence(?). I can certainly see how "cleverness" might
> designate a certain poetic intelligence brought to bear on individual
> poems--an intelligence that all great and even good (enough) poetry
> probably evinces. (Keats, did you say? Now, there's a clever one!)
>
> With Muldoon, though, the term seems to be designating a foregrounded,
> self-conscious "cleverness" as a poetic stratagem in some of his work
> (for better or worse). I would never take anything that conspicuously
> foregrounded in a poem by someone as obviously intelligent as Muldoon
> at face value, since the aim of it's foregrounding is likely to be
> beguilement. He doesn't have to prove how clever he is, in other
> words, so I wonder what he's up to with his swash and his swagger in
> the Gaelakota tongue of those cleverly bespoked poems.
>
> "Holy Thursday" doesn't seem to me to have that sort of quality at
> all, though, with its muted, vaguely "kindly" air of languor--a
> downstyle that deploys simplicity as seasoning and gives this poem
> (stew, soup) an unexpectedly rich, robust broth: a very clever poem
> indeed (as Peter Howard has already noted).
>
> Candice
>
>
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