According to an article in today's Guardian, peak oil has been reached (in 2006), and from here on in industrial 21st century civilisation(s) is coasting downhill, at 7% a year, on a slippery slope to war for rarer and rarer, scarcer and scarcer resources. 2030 is either going to be very cold, or very warm - or both. Depending on which way the news blows, I'm never sure whether we're doomed, or about to have life prolonged for 200 years by Venter. Weird, science, indeed.
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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