The USSR has a history of crushing dissent, in the spring. One need only think of Prague. And, tanks sent from Moscow rolled into Budapest too. In both cities, in both countries, proud rebels opposed the moves. But the tanks crushed in the end. Russia is not the USSR, as I have been arguing, but since its Winter Games it has been playing a very aggressive sort of game with geo-politics. I think the reason is the Black Sea Fleet, and the emotive, and real, linguistic and ethnic ties between Russia proper and Crimea. President Putin, playing to the home crowd, would become a great iron man if he took back the Crimea. I fear he may just try. I am not sure what could or would stop him, short of thermo-nuclear threat, or severe economic sanctions. This is the closest the world has been on the brink of world war since before 1989 - in a quarter century. I don't think it is time to duck and dive just yet. But this is serious.
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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