We've had parliaments of fowls, now we have one fouled. The "mother of all parliaments" - that in London - the seat of British democracy - is now it appears the floundering seat of entitlement, hypocrisy, and pitiful corruption (expenses claimed for moats, helipads and manure). British pundits are suggesting this might be a collapse in the public acceptance of politics as we know it - a sort of latter-day let-them-eat-cake moment. Will there be an English Revolution, at last? This is the worst of times, and the worst of times, but I don't see too many heads rolling yet - though the red-faced, blustering Speaker of the House should go, and soon. European elections are coming, and, should this utter fiasco, which leaves few moral compasses left unsmashed and pointing due North, swing to the right, Britain might get darker, before it gets a proper dawn.
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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