WCW had his plumbs. Britain, and Northern Europe, continues to have volcanic plumes. This is getting more Day of the Triffids every hour. Over 100,000 Brits are stranded in the near abroad. Was it just me, or did the streets seem deserted in London today? Anyway, no one is panicking, yet. If this is prolonged, of course, the economy would collapse, and people would go mad. But not yet. My partner is one of those stranded. Eyewear is a bit at sea with all this compromised sky.
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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