The latest influenza figures for Britain are to be released today - and it is expected they will indicate a surge in serious illness and deaths related to the H1N1 virus, currently the primary 'flu circulating, at epidemic proportions in the UK. Vaccines are low. Healthy younger people under 65 are most-affected. Will this be the crisis feared and predicted in 2009, or will it peak with relatively few fatalities? It seems odd not to keep schools closed a week or two, to let the seasonal virus settle.
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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As you know TS, a poet has to earn a living, and one of my roles with my current employer was working on the Swine-Flu Help-line back in Summer 2009. The problem now, as then, is that the mere mention of Swine-Flu seems to turn people hysterical, like some Middle-Ages Plague. I can't say too much about the work we did on the Help-line due to the confidential nature of the role, but it would not at all surprise me if the Swine-Flu virus does emerge again as a headline grabber in a generally slow time for news.