It has been five years since that shocking, terrible day in London - which began around now, as commuters headed to work - now called 7/7 - when bombers took many lives, and ground London to a halt. The day before London had been awarded the 2012 Olympic Games. I remember thinking - London will never recover. But I was new to London, and didn't yet realise that its fabled "Blitz spirit" was genuinely present. Or rather, people just got on with it - walking home, walking to work. But people died. The tube and buses became, symbolically, more deadly (for awhile); and an innocent man was soon afterwards shot dead in public. There has been no successful terrorist attack in England since then. Were lessons learned? Is the war in Afghanistan working? Londoners don't fear for their safety these days. Five years is a long time. Yet, families, friends, loved ones, remain permanently changed by July 7, 2005. We must spare them a thought, now and in future.
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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