The news today on my Blackberry BBC app was totally dominated by America - reminding us that, even now, with the supposed upsurge of the so-called BRIC countries, no other nation on Earth still manages to hold such cultural sway (at least in the UK): the death of Steve Jobs, the stepping aside of Sarah Palin, the ranking of CalTech as the world's top university, riots on Wall Street, and American university human cloning advances - here is a nation in ferment, capable of creating great personalities and institutions, that further human genius. Why? Because, cynicism aside, no other nation is as free, or expansive imaginatively. As Jobs said, famously, we should never settle. Find a true calling and go for it. This is a lesson other nations, who continue to suppress their people, might heed. For now, America remains the indispensible country, for good and ill, as the twin poles of Jobs and Palin remind us.
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
Steve Jobs' advice 'never to settle' is valuable advice indeed. It's so tempting to take that shelf-stacking job at Tesco's when the bills start flooding in! In my earlier comment, I described him as a protestant. He actually converted to Buddhism. My apologies.
Best wishes from Simon