Eyewear saw There Will Be Blood last night. It wasn't Kane - it was morose and downbeat like Ambersons, with some of the muddiness and new century cornpone of that film - and it made me think there will be hype. I found the didactic false prophet vs. false profit motif slightly linear, and the lack of any character development curious. Of course, the acting was bravura, the tone and pace original, and the Malickian attention to men at labour in American fields, moving and well-shot. It may grow on me. One thing about the Oscars this year - most of the US films up for the big awards were very dark, very violent - this is the age of Bush - and the toxic blowback from Iraq has just now begun to seep in to the water supply in Hollywood. The best American movie of 2007 was possibly the third Bourne feature - in terms of direction, and suspense; it too, was violent, and political, but somehow deemed irrelevant - perhaps because it expressed its skills so openly. Anyway, the good news may be this: a fourth Bourne could happen. If it does, let's hope they stick to the formula (same theme song, same look, same actors, same director).
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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