A terrible injustice has occurred in the UK. If it had happened in Russia or Iran, we'd be enraged and shocked. A woman has terminated her pregnancy (very late) by her own hand, and buried the dead foetus. The judge and law call this a baby, and have jailed her for 8 years. The judge is a Christian fanatic, as it turns out, opposed to abortion laws as they now stand. As a Catholic, I know what I am supposed to think, but as a rational and tolerant human I know what I believe - no man (or other person) can tell a woman what to do with her womb; Sarah Catt may have done something sad, unfortunate, even borderline troubling. Wrong, unethical - debatable. But criminal? No. This person is a political prisoner, imprisoned by a fanatical Christian patriarchy, and she should and must be freed. In a week that bristles with rage at MP's shouting at police officers, let us spare some sympathy for Ms. Catt, who has been slapped with the law's worst insult: contempt.
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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