Those of us who grew up reading Nostradamus, and paperbacks predicting the Beast was coming soon, to end the world, and anyone who ever saw the film The Rapture, will know what I mean when I say, it has been getting a bit Apocalyptic lately. Yes, it is true, all times in world history have been "bad", more or less, for most people. But the news that the Ebola virus, arguably the most horrible infectious disease since The Bubonic Plague (and more deadly), has become entrenched in three capital cities in West Africa is sinister. And, the almost total collapse of order in the Middle East. As well as near-catastrophic environmental problems, species extinction, and of course, a startling rise of extremely violent anti-woman porn across all Internet platforms - it all adds up to Dark Times. Are these the New Dark Ages? We do seem to be facing a world of war, pestilence, plague, famine, and increasing heat (with flooding on the way). The 21st century seems, at present, to be heading to Hell. What to do? Well, it might help if we all tried to get along and be nicer to each other on Facebook, but frankly, that sounds a bit meek, doesn't it? There likely needs to be a revolution in sensibility, a change in vision, for the vast majority of humankind, before real change can be effected, and that won't, at the very least, halt the Ebola virus. I am worried.
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. What do I mean by smart?
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