Tomorrow is the British General Election. It's still too close to call, but many polls are suggesting a small Tory majority. In my seat, Westminster North, the Labour candidate Karen Buck is up against the Tory candidate (a so-called Cameron Cutie) Joanne Cash; so, Buck vs. Cash. The Lib Dem is one Mark Blackburn. This seat is considered the 61th easiest for the Conservatives to swing their way (they need a little more than a 3% swing to take it from Buck). So, I, like many other voters, am faced with a choice - to vote for my preferred party, the Lib Dems, or vote tactically, to help keep Cash out. This is a tough call, because while I don't want there to be a Tory government, I also am loathe to support the morally-bankrupt and exhausted Labour party; New Labour was ugly to behold. However, I admire the way Brown has been (finally) expressing his truer convictions. If only he'd found his soul sooner.
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?
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