The British election campaign has begun, more or less - and the voting is likely to held on May 6. Eyewear declares its support, without much fanfare, for The Liberal Democrats, led by Nick Clegg. Labour under Gordon Brown was faltering, indecisive, weak when not surly or arrogant, and, on Iraq, the Gurkhas, and MPs for hire, unimpressive. Eyewear does not support the cuts in taxation advocated by Osborne and the Tories, and suspects that beneath the Morrissey-loving exterior facade of father-to-be normalcy, David Cameron is still a bit of a retrograde toff, a Thatcher-Lite. If enough voters support the Lib Dems - who opposed the Iraq War, and, with Vince Cable, foresaw the banking crisis - then Britain might finally get what it so badly needs - a viable third party. A hung parliament would be good for these people, and for uz.
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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