It wouldn't be Eyewear if it didn't mention the illegal Iraq war from time to time - and it wouldn't be Britain if there wasn't an establishment urge to cover the whole thing up. It seems almost absurd that, at a time when even in Iran the supreme authorities are having to rethink their anti-democratic shenanigans, so strong is the democratic pressure from the people, Gordon Brown - Prime Minister in name only - continues to try and pull the hood over our eyes about the mess he and Tony got us into (with a little help from George). I won't wax polemical here - you can imagine the rest. Only one thing though - how did Brown think this anti-transparent whitewash would get past us, so soon after he promised a brand new listening-and-improving self? He's the same-old-Brown, alas. Willing to learn lessons - but only if some other anonymous person's results are graded for him, in secret, in a dark room, under the seabed, where everybody is truthful and intelligence never fails.
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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