David Cameron, in move that would have inspired a Larkin poem, has cut 11,000 jobs in the military, at the moment that Britain may go to war against Libya. Certainly, we are maybe hours or days away from a no-fly zone, and perhaps ground support should the Colonel use WMDs on his own people. Eyewear believes it is justified to support the Libyan protesters, and stop this insane (and oddly giggling) regime from any more genocidal behaviour - even if that means boots on the ground. Cameron could erase the folly of Iraq, with a just war, now.
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?
Comments
It's distractive opportunism and blatant hypocrisy.
This is, and will remain, one of my favourite blogs. But I expected more from such a well informed and informative outpost.
Simplicity of a fist.