For all those who love Tokyo, and Japan, the news this morning that Tokyo drinking water is no longer safe for infants to drink due to radioactive levels is more than alarming - it is tragic. One can only hope that somehow the reactors get back on the grid soon and some sort of control replaces the radiating chaos.
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
So long,
Corinna
P.S.: Found you via Profile favorite books (Homo Faber) and saw that you also liked Echo&theBunnymen -- haven't listened to them in a while but used to like them a lot.
Of course, we will also need to start forming human militias to prepare for the inevitable day that that the robots rise up against us. Gangs of organ-harvesting robots sometimes intrude in my nightmares. So perhaps we should equip the robots with giant red shutdown buttons in the middle of their chests, so they could be disabled by a rock thrown by an urchin in the tattered ruins of an urban battlezone.