Today we have been reminded of the outlaw nature of the sea - as one country defends its blockade with violence, and another threatens a criminal investigation into a massive corporation that has catastrophically failed to live up to its promises. The high seas, below and above, remain wild places, the home of piracy, rapine behavior and wanton criminality - indeed, their lawlessness reminds us of what humans get up to, when unfettered by laws, or held back by virtue. What is perhaps more unsettling is to consider how matters are not much better, once, apparently evolved, we crawl onto the land. For on land, where governance, and laws, obtain, companies and governments have managed to incorporate a web of so-called laws, agreements, decrees, principles, doctrines, ad infinitum - that add up to what, precisely? - money and power dominate; the weak are unprotected; and the voiceless, human or animal or plant, at the mercy of barely-veiled thuggery. As humans, we may talk a good game, but we know our pensions ride on the profits of BP, and that our allies buy and sell weapons that we make for them so that the economy - that hateful excuse for every sin under the sun - can "recover". One wants to say clean up the mess. Where to begin? We have leagues to go before we sleep.
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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