The news that Russia has recognised the breakaway republics hitherto within Georgia will be bad news for many people - and perhaps most of all Mr. Obama. With the resurgent rise of The Bear, The West has become more militant and tense than ever, and McCain more than matches Biden when it comes to the foreign policy seriousness the American people seem to require at this time. New polls in American suggest this is already a tied race. It just got less-than-tied, I think - McCain will find rising problems with Russia to his relative advantage.
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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