Eyewear was in the Olympic Stadium last night for the greatest show on earth - Usain Bolt's run into history, as world's fastest man, redux. First, let me say that if Britain was run like the Olympics we would all be better off - it was efficient, uniformly friendly, and upbeat. Britain isn't broken, it just needs to rise to the occasion which it is doing for these games, splendidly. Secondly, let me note that poetry is not as great as sport. Hearing and seeing 80,000 people erupt in joy after Bolt ran is a corrective to the notion that poems just need to be clearer, or rhyme, or be in traditional forms, or funny, to "win an audience". No, to win an audience these days, one needs to genuinely enthral, thrill and impress, with something astounding. There is no sense of cheap faux celebrity about Bolt. The greatness is in the doing, and the deed is heroic. Finally, on the subject of Bolt's authenticity - God, let's hope there's no doping involved, as with Canada's Ben. The world may be in severe crisis financially, and politically, and environmentally, but we can still dream and cheer. It would be splendid to know that what we are cheering is the Real Thing.
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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