Briefly, a show I loved was cancelled recently: Flashforward. It wasn't a good show. In fact, it was a bad one. Therefore, I suspect there were sound financial reasons for cancelling it. But I started watching Flashforward when it started, September 2009. I was very ill. The show dealt with the future, with fear of dying, and with hope things could be better. It also had a lot of silly premises and fun action scenes, and some over-the-top villainy. It ended end of May - 9 months from when it began. This gestation period also marked my road to recovery - June 1 marks the official return to full-time duties to me; and a year to go on my PhD, due end of May 2011. I am on a lower dose of medication than ever before, and my symptoms are currently under control. The pain is gone. Often, the fear. So, a silly show that squandered its 12 million viewers has been terminated abruptly. The sadness in this is tinged with a sense that television approaches the pathos of poetry when it is cancelled. While a show is in blazing glory, popular and well-loved and watched, it seems invincible, and music for the masses. When it dies, it seems to become ephemeral, even subtle - fragile, and unwanted, it has a more poetic lyric nature revealed - it becomes flooded with desire for what is absent. Flashforward, like many other shows cancelled before their time (notably Star Trek) may be resurrected, as a movie for TV or film - but that seems unlikely in this case. Heroes, too, has recently been axed. So was Prison Break. Shows we loved once, that began with great promise, have ended like Crane or Schwartz. Maybe that's what we love about TV - its mayfly persistence. Its flickering insubstantial mortality. TV, like we humans, can't last for more than a few seasons.
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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