Eyewear is a staunch supporter of the Olympic movement, and, as a Canadian landed in London, is wide-eyed at the lack of British interest in the Vancouver Games, about to begin in a mostly snowless environment that beggars belief. The British like their hardware, and their medal haul at the summer games were impressive. They don't do snow that well - leaves on the tracks slow them, snow halts the nation. Winter does not inspire athleticism here, but weary hunkered down stoic getting on. So it is, Team GB aims to win three medals. Meanwhile, the big story about Canada's team is two-fold: a) they've never won a home Gold: and b) they have created a scientific project to plan to dominate their own games. That seems oddly inhospitable, but it was time to do Soviet-era science on the bobsledders. The Winter Games are good spectacle. Cool eyewear, Velcro and Lycra. Stupendous spills. Rocketing pucks. May the flame never go out!
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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That said, I do hope all goes well once the games begin.
RIP Nodar Kumaritashvili