After a pretty good winter games, Russia faces the hangover - trouble in their backyard that threatens to turn into conflict with the West, and perhaps, even, war. Famously, the Crimea belonged to Russia (in the former USSR) until as the stories have it in the 1950s a drunken Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine within the same system, a tactical blunder to be sure. As we have seen in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, the Balkans, and even, Quebec and Scotland, seccesionism has an ugly side. Civil wars happen when one group claims to speak for the majority, but leaves a sizable minority out of the equation. In this case, that Russian-speaking minority is based mainly in the Crimea, and is strategically located near the Black Sea Fleet, not a thing Russia is every likely to let go of easily (Russia has long fought to secure its access to that body of water). The revolution in Ukraine appears to have unseated a flunky and a bit of a despot with expensive tastes, but it has also unleashed explosive forces that could, however unlikely this sounds, drag us into a new world war, 100 years after the first one. After all, if Russia were to fight to protect its Russian Crimean community, where would NATO stand in relation to our friend, Ukraine? Doubtless, de-escalation would follow escalation but hot heads could prevail. Or, as in Georgia a few years ago, things sputtered after a few firework displays of nationalism. The problem for those of us who care about the Ukrainian people and their self-determination is that Ukraine is, like many remapped places, complex and not easily divisible. Nikita's shoe may bang down once again.
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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