... in a week. Eyewear goes off to walk in Exmoor National Park, and low and behold, the silly summer season turns baldly interesting: Brown down, Obama OTT in Berlin as JM glumly trudges around Berlinsvilles "back home", and, of course, the deranged war criminal masquerading as a hippie. Not to mention "Batman" getting arrested in a posh hotel for having a "disagreement" over money with his Mum. What a week. Meanwhile, let me say this about that, as Nixon used to: England's coombes and seacoasts are as beautiful as any anywhere else - and, when the sun's out, you don't need to fly off to that elsewhere, either. Exmoor Cream Teas are to be enjoyed, but, in moderation. Oh, by the way, Eyewear is thinking of supporting Scottish Independence. Scotland would be one of the great nations, culturally, politically, and even in terms of natural resources, on its own, unmoored from the English-Welsh ball and chain. Then, if Quebec separated too, they could form a new "auld" alliance, a sort of Franco-Scots pact.
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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