Rarely has a day been so fraught with peril and possibility as St. Patrick's Day, 2011. On the one hand, we have the potential for three or four nuclear meltdowns, that might wreak great havoc on Japan, and on the other, we have the danger that rebel-held Libya might fall to the brutal government forces. In both ongoing dramas, each of the highest possible orders of importance, brave people are facing mortal danger to try and save the day. In each case, the outcome is fully uncertain - will the rods be cooled in time, will the West intervene and stop the Colonel? By the weekend, we may be looking at two compounded tragedies, or two upward trajectories to sunny uplands of hope and repair, or a mix. Fingers crossed.
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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