The Olympic torch - once a near-inextinguishable brand (or is that symbol?) of something good - is guttering in London. The culprit is China, whose recent brazen incarceration of a man whose chief crime seems to have been to critique obvious flaws in the system, is sadly obscuring the glory of the Olympian flames, with rather shady behaviour. Eyewear had hoped this would not be another 1936 - but it seems increasingly likely. China doesn't get it - it can't host a wonderful, open, world event, and also continue to be a bullying tyranny.
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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