Almost everyone in the world of tennis has lined up to kick poor David Nalbandian, suddenly the most infamous poor sport in recent memory. I for one feel some sympathy for him. Most people have a wee temper - not that they usually kick bits of wood perilously close to people's shins - and we can all imagine being a player, stressed, frustrated, tired, momentarily seeing red, and booting some wood. It was Nalbandian's bad luck that the wood broke off, and badly cut an official's leg - a most unfortunate accident. But accident it was. Yet the look of pompous incredulity on the official's face suggests a certain noblesse oblige at work. One does not do such things here. Anyway, Nalbandian was immediately declared the loser, fined a great deal of money, and is even now being investigated by the police, who presumably have no murders or rapes to look into. What a lot of nonsense. The match was spoiled, the crowd and players denied a proper final, and a good player has been unduly tarnished over a split-second misjudgement that was hardly malicious. There is an old-fashioned concept: charity. It was not shown by anyone with any duty of care, or concern, at this event.
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
I couldn't agree with you more. What Nalbandian did was positively tame compared with what McEnroe and Connors used to get up to.
Best wishes from Simon