In one of the oddest, and most potentially self-destructive moves ever in democratic history, lawmakers and politicians in America have voted down the package to save the American economy, even though Obama and McCain, broadly, supported it. I am speechless, not a normal Eyewear thing to be. I suppose this was to save their skins (average folk were mightily agin it). Where does this leave the presidential candidates, and, more vitally, the capitalist economy? By calling such a massive bluff, will these elected mavericks herald the end of the banking system, or prove that the death-knell was less close than argued. This is a weird moment.
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?
Comments
It reminds me of how the Major government's approach to BSE destroyed its credibility as far as making statements about science was concerned.
It's the boy who cried wolf, the boy being Bush, the wolf being "mushroom clouds," "heckuva job," and the like.
And the representatives are listening to their constituents instead of to Bush and Co.