Gordon Brown is having a bad week. Make that last few weeks. He bottled the election, and then has continued to be weak, indecisive, and rudderless - from the environment, to the Olympics, to any number of things. The talk, in this weekend's UK press, is that the contest may already be on to suceed him. One hopes so. Labour is doomed under this dour dot. Meanwhile, Mr. Mugabe has managed to coin one of the funniest insults ever in political history, even while managing to ruin a whole nation. Calling Gordon Brown a "tiny dot on this planet" was funny - but mainly weird. Mugabe's priceless fist-gesture was part of the impact of the taunt, which was a direct hit on Brown's already scuppered-vessel.
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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