BBC Radio 4 has just now been debating whether Raoul Moat is a worthy folk-hero - as Eyewear predicted might happen, a bandit hero cult has developed around the tragic man. It seems a bad idea to have Tasered a man with a shotgun to his head (the jolts caused can lead to involuntary spasms and hence pulling of a trigger) - or to have kept his family members away, when they wanted to tell him he was loved (he was bemoaning his lonely state). Meanwhile, the police office who he shot point blank has forgiven him, though he may now be blind. In another case of miscarried justice - and deranged men - Roman Polanski has been freed from his luxurious house arrest. This is a pity. Although a brilliant film director, he also seems to be something of a sexual predator. There is of course one law for dirt poor fugitives like Moat, and another law for suave rich abusers like Polanski. Will the director become a folk-hero too? Finally, speaking of violent men what was that with the Netherlands last night? A hockey game broke out on the pitch. Shameful. There should be red cards for poets online, to curb drunk-blogging and other high kicks.
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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