Thanks for all the get-well comments. My condition is ongoing but hopefully can be managed by the treatments on offer. At the moment I am mostly in some pain throughout the day. I don't intend to return too often to these pages for a month or so, but did want to briefly mention that, after thinking about it, I agree with the arrest of Polanski. Chinatown is a great film, and was once my favourite, - as is Fearless Vampire Killers, Bitter Moon, and Frantic - but what he did (which he admitted to) is a crime that warrants punishment. As with Pound, we can have the man, and the work, and need not tar the one with the other. Polanski's tormented, oddly unfortunate life deepened the filmic intensity of his best projects, but the films rarely open out onto any apology or remorse, for evil. They're works of genius; but a genius inflected darkly.
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
I would tend to agree with you but I don't think that Katy Evans-Bush does. There is a good debate on her blog about this issue if you haven't already seen it. Sorry to hear that you're still ill and hope that your health takes a turn for the better soon.
Best wishes from Simon & Rusty
I am at a loss why such super intelligent intelligent people like Barbet Schroeder would so immediately put their names on that petition. A lo9t of right-wing freaks have been attacking these people. However, there is no true polarity here, except the a lot of intelligent people are falling for the line that they should protect their own - I mean, intelligentsia. Thank goodness you are not falling for that. I think Luc Besson put it best about Polansk; while, he was a nice man, and he made brilliant films, he shouldn't necessarily go free for what he did. Luc Besson conclude that he himself was a father with a daughter.
And those committed by our Prime Minister here in Italy?