Happy Easter! Today at Mass the priest reminded us of the classic song 'Staying Alive' - corny but apt. Easter, for Christians, is about renewal, and the promise of resurrection. I am personally assaying renewal, but still struggling with the idea of physical resurrection. I can better get my head around the spirit of the Easter message, while the fine print makes me unsure. Life and the world seems the place for love, and kindness, and tolerance, first. What comes after, if and when it does, seems less groundbreaking (pun alert). Still, the hope and promise of everlasting life is joyous. For now, I will take family meals, friendship, some apple juice, and sun, and the turn to May, as my slice of rebirth.
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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I am no Catholic as you know but I actually prefer this pope to the last one. He is very intelligent and an accomplished linguist - fluent in around half-a-dozen languages.
Best wishes from Simon