As an Eyewear reader has noted, 2010 may be year 2 of the new decade, not year one, depending on whether you consider 09 was the end of the 00s, or '10 was. Since I consider counting from 1 to ten as a decade I thought 11 was the first year, but it does seem true to consider 1920 part of the Twenties, 1930 part of the 30s, etc... your thoughts? I suppose the tens started with 2010...
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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31 December 1999 however, was a total wash-out; I saw it in at the back of one's flat in Muswell Hill, looking at my watch on a deserted Springfield Avenue, one's final whim and want crushed, not seeing in the new year on my to-the-second digital G Shock watch, it's arrival unmarked, missed by five seconds, on the road that leads to a pedestrian entrance to the Grove, an anti-park of Alexandra Palace.
After rushing out of the house paranoid, wanting only to see the penultimate 999th year kick in, switch on, on a gshock, and failing in this, modest dream, on that night, for that time; I gave up, and for the real millenium, planned zero, nothing, at best in the local pits pub sharing with the rest of a few there who did not welcome me into their hokey cokey line at auld ang sayne in O'Neills Church pub that functioned as the biggest, main boozer on the Hill; and only then, expecting nowt, God appeared, at the dawn of the next 1000 years, in North London, Todd.
A wonderfully cool and pleasant place in which to pose, the Grove, because there's a vegetarian cafe there, a wooden construction in cool North London, drop dead original & classy vein, expensive people and scumbags comingling equally with brave, weak, poor allsorts and an everyperson majority making us up, the English & Londoner blow-ins, it seemed, mostly, when at home being ourselves in the House of our Family carrying on there, ooh er yeh ms us English people, and you, you out there reading this alone, with freinds, significant others and beloved sons and daughters our race birth, in North London, South Londoner faux fitz de Swift satirical, sassy, supremely talented foe, bumming away, every day, to be the best, to be the best and attaining capacity as a poet of the first world order, as per, er, you know, Todd, we are all 'in' the same square of winsome joy, counting courses, weighing every breath, penny, projection into a commentariat class, facebook fraud, page selecting profiles, robosigners deciding on this or that, previews removed the views expressed, right flicking eyes connect... you did ask (still perhaps?) for our 'thoughts', unquote.
Des.
affello is the word verification. Nuff sed.