I feel a little guilty. I am coping with some rather personal stressful stuff at the moment, and to unwind, I have started to watch the Breaking Bad season as it starts up again, on Netflix. I had thought to write another critical love poem to this greatest of TV shows, to compare it to Shakespeare, to speak of how Heisenberg - that co-opted alias - is now synonymous with complex evil, as Iago was. But then I think of Egypt - and a far more complex evil swims into view - or rather, a more evil complexity - for politics and people seem to mix badly some times, and there seems no clear answer in that tragic moment for that great country - because of such confusing paradoxes - the legitimate government was overthrown for being a tyranny in utero, and the new saving revolution is seemingly more steeped in blood than the last guardians of so-called Democracy. How to praise the depiction of one man's ruination, when in the history of today, unfolding, we see a whole nation's self-immolation. Perhaps that is too grand. But I did think I wanted to write it out.
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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