The new Coalition government in Britain is a Thatcherite project by another name, as can now be seen - with its main goal to make the State wither away - the total opposite of the Marxist aim of having Capitalism dissolve. As such, it is a purely market-driven (and ideological) construct, no matter how liberal or fair it claims to be. There is something thrilling and caustic, being in the hands of such clearly driven engineers. But also dangerous. Many people will be hurt by this, and some corporations not enough. To attempt to replace government spending with export as a large chunk of the economy in three years is wildly ambitious. Canada did it in the 90s. And turned sharply right ever after. 33 years after The Sex Pistols (as poet Tony Lewis-Jones has reminded me) we all have something to shout about again.
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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Don't blame me! My wife and I both voted Labour. This outcome was entirely predictable and everyone who is too young to remember Mrs Thatcher will be able to experience at first hand the privation and misery of life under a Tory administration.
Best wishes from Simon