I haven’t been writing as much lately because friends and family are sick and it’s difficult to concentrate. I’ve been buying things to distract myself, one of which was All the Poems.
B.D. McClay has just come out with a good post about the geniuses of full-on corn1 which mentions Stevie Smith’s cute affect but I don’t think Smith was ever cute exactly, that involves being too directly appealing. Childlike? If I wanted to be mean, I could say adolescent in a kind of Emily the Strange way, but that would be mean for no reason and also wrong in terms of quality. Arch might be a better description, but that sounds smug, like somebody’s badly written romantic hero or heroine. Detached might be a better description, watching and ready to remove herself from the situation. That sounds like a psychological condemnation but it’s not, she was writing poetry and not into an advice column.
Go out and buy the book yourself—the poems are wonderful and the drawings that Smith did to accompany them are wonderful, too.
I cannot find any sort of biographical consensus about Stevie Smith’s private life, which I really shouldn’t need to know about but I am nosy. Depending on who you read, she was either 99 percent celibate and or she slept with both her therapist and Orwell. I guess the two aren’t exclusionary. Anyway, I came across a post about Stevie Smith from a blogger that I used to read, a real old-school blogger in that nothing was monetized and every post was as long as the author wanted and as negative as the author wanted. I fell off reading pre-COVID, so once I was done finding out nothing about Stevie Smith’s private life, I went to the latest post and found out that the blogger had had a stroke. Really? I felt personally insulted, even though the insult wasn’t to me. Nobody will stay healthy to reassure me, huh? None of you are immortal? My narcissism has been wounded by this book of Stevie Smith poetry!
Aside: of all the corny creators that ever were, Richard Curtis has to be up there. Yet I’m also convinced that he’s somehow evil. Can the two coexist? Can you be corny and evil? Maybe it’s just that his worldview doesn’t line up precisely with mine but I refuse to believe that my instincts are wrong. He’s at the very least corny (derogatory).
I’m sorry about your family and hope they get better soon (he said cornily).
On the Corny/Evil intersection, I present a certain Mr. Spielberg.
Thank you! And where does the evil come from in Spielberg? I'm willing to entertain it, I just need the explanation...