Canada - often described by the British media as "boring" - has the second most important single geographical structure (the first is the Amazon rain forest) to protect the world from apocalyptic global warming - the "white parasol" - and news today has it that around 25% of that has been lost - this year alone - in extreme calving of the Canadian ice-shelf.
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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I read an article in the N. Geographic about what would happen if all the ice (glaciers, arctic caps etc.) melted. A rise of 100 meters they said. I wrote a little something about it:
A 100 METER RISE
Google Earth’s rounded Pacific, you get the picture:
every thing, every one we stood or lay down for
painted into corners, land’s blemish largely gone
below doodling, skywriting waves; gaunt
cities gridlocked in silence, occasionally lit
by a neon-bright school. A species’ name "writ
in water" – the scattered bone-pearls
sunken as old wrecks where "seaweed sways and swirls
as if swaying were its form of stillness". Pour
me another one. I guess I should get out more.
(The quoted lines are from Keats and D.H. Lawrence)