Eyewear is always pleased to hear Jimmy Page play guitar, and to see Beckham kick a football, but feels that there's something rotten in Britain when the tired tropes of umbrellas and red doubledecker buses are hauled out to pass on the visual and symbolic Olympic torch. Worse still, though, for London's handover moment (8 minutes of rock and roll and bland choreography), was the lack of imagination - instead of flights of fancy and wonder, such as China displayed (or Athens before it), we were offered the familiar image of urban celebrity - a jaded air, a fug, of louche backstage pass cynicism hungover the handover - as if the 2012 Olympics were just one more reunion tour for some aging stars. London, and by extension, the UK - can and will do better than this, I am sure. Few other nations possess so much visual and verbal dexterity - Rowling, for one, could offer tips on how to do magic. This sub-Herman's Hermits moment, of bus stop torpor, must be by-passed quickly. London's swinging - hopefully as a pendulum, away from cliche, and into fresh, original, innovative design.
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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