Obama, as we know, could not stop the earthquake in Haiti (and even God didn't); humans can only do their best to help in the painful aftermath. In Britain, the DEC are doing a great job, and Oxfam is a part of that. Meanwhile, Obama is plunging in the polls - unable to answer the prayers of the left-leaning and the radical who raised him up merely a year ago. Never has the real in real politik seemed so disappointing. There are calls for more radicalism, or more centrism. Obama claims he would rather be a one-term wonder than a mediocre longer-lasting Prez. Yet that remains to be seen. A one term presidency that bequeathed the world Palin or Brown or both would be a disaster. But Obama is not to blame, alone. The American voters are more fickle than ice cream in the Alabama sun. The shameless desertion in the Kennedy backyard was bad. The general willingness to disregard the perils of global warming, and become petrified of universal health care, is far worse - the average American is ill-informed, perhaps self-interested to an extreme the rest of the world can no longer afford. Obama will only be great if he does great things. He has less than three years to do so.
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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