The news that Barclays has paid a 1% tax rate on a massive £6 billion profit, at a time when the poor and middle-class in Britain are being subjected to astonishingly severe ideological cuts is appalling. Okay - but beyond the editorials - What Is To Be Done? So long as the people of Britain allow the financial services industries-Tories-capitalism to dictate what's good for us, there is no hope. We see the future - one with a two-tiered health service; minimal welfare; sold-off forests; little or no cultural funding - a Big Society where the Big own and run and enjoy the society, and the rest of us, underfoot, foot the bills. I wonder when the British will radicalise sufficiently to speak out against this established unfairness - and topple it.
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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