This article usefully, and frighteningly, relays how the swine flu virus can bind to either the respiratory system, or the intestinal tracks, in humans, and, if it binds higher, kill quickly through pneumonia, if the immune system reacts too strongly with inflammation. The current claims, to keep us calm, are that this is mild, but the latest science is that the virus can, and likely will, mutate and kill quickly (the 1918 version killed young people in hours, not days). London is now Swine Flu Central. This is a terrifying pandemic at the early stages, and, each step of the way, it has leaped to the next level, exactly as predicted. I for one remain concerned.
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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