The recent disaster in The Philippines - which may be the result of man made global climate change on some deeper level - is also a nail in the coffin of an interventionist God. My Catholic theology has wavered, and it now is blown over by yet another assault on my sensibilities. No God I know would massacre thousands in a windstorm. But then, I do not know God. I can only know what he is not, so feeble is my human ken. At any rate, the universe moves in remote, strange and often cruel ways. All we can do as mortals is try to pick up the pieces when nature, in its broad brutal swathes of dumb action negates us. We must gesture towards what a kind presence overbearing all would do. We must try to be God in the curious absence of one. Those poor people!
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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