The history of the decade begun in September, 2001, has come to a strange and unexpected sort of conclusion today. Waking to history, I was confronted with the death of the most famous enemy of America. The cheers at the death of a human - slightly vulgar - shocked me, but I also felt a curious elation at knowing that Obama had achieved what Bush did not - and some sense of closure. Unfortunately, ripples of violence seem likely - terrorism is complex, despite its seemingly simplistic message. Still, this day, May 2, 2011, is historic.
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 fell asleep listening to the World Service. When I awoke, I thought that Henry Cooper had been hunted down and killed and Osama/Obama had been declared undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.
Best wishes from Simon