In Britain, a man is currently pleading manslaughter after strangling a woman he alleges screamed after he kissed her. This is a tragic crime. In Libya, the streets are gleeful with the death of a man, pulled, terrified and pleading, from a storm drain. Once a powerful tyrant, he was now weak, humbled. So they shot him in the head, pulled his body about, and cheered and jeered. Obama, and Cameron, have claimed this as a great day for that nation. Actually, it is a barbaric day. A tragedy. Each human death is terrible. Each life should be guarded, and nurtured. No one is too wicked to deserve a fair trial, or humane treatment. We deride the law in Iran that calls for cruel punishments that fit the crime, and yet applaud mob justice when it suits our ends. As in Iraq, this assassination has silenced an inconvenient maverick, who dared to challenge the hegemony of the oil-starved nations of the West. Is it good he is no longer in power? Yes. Is it wrong that he was taken dead, not alive? Also Yes.
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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