In The Player, one of the great Hollywood films about itself, a suit trying to imagine a writerless future for their studio picks up the paper, and pitches movies from the headlines. British film could get like that, and do no harm - too many of its films are set in a tough-guy world of the banal. Consider this just in. Who knew that the most remote island community in the whole world was British, and lived on a volcano? Not Eyewear. In the meantime, this is also reality, and let us hope the disease is cured soon, and medical supplies reach sooner.
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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