#extreme intelligence

[tomorrowusa]

According to Donald Trump, if you pass this simplistic cognitive test, you can then claim that you have "extreme intelligence".

The CBC's Andrew Chang walks us through the Montreal Cognitive Assessment which the Orange One brags that he "aced".

Truly intelligent people seldom brag about being smart. The more you know, the more you realize how much you really don't know.

A person who claims to be a "stable genius" is probably neither.

[nonplussed]

i have a feeling i've posted at least part of this before, but i don't give a damn.

DG: I understand what you're saying. Far more Americans will always know who the baseball players are than who the poets are. Does that discourage you?

GK: What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.

DG: "The Last River," a poem you wrote of your time in the South, is included in your Selected Poems (1982) but not in your recently published collection, A New Selected Poems (2000).  It's not one of your best known poems, but it's a poem I admire and a good piece suited to current times.  Why did you take it out?

GK: The reason I took it out is that I don't think it's as good a poem as it should be, and yet I don't see how I could fix it now. When I went down there to work in the South, I thought it would be unseemly for me to "use" the situation down there as material for art, and I decided not to write a word while I was there. I put aside everything having to do directly with poetry. A couple of years later, I realized that was a serious mistake; I had misunderstood the relationship of art and life. It was ignorant idealism. Later, I tried to write about it, but what I wrote lacked the life that it might have had originally.

  DG: Indeed, yours do. And this idea you have often expressed—for example, in an essay on Walt Whitman—that poets can write themselves toward a better self if they are honest in their self-knowledge. Can you say something about that?

GK: If we divide humankind into the good and the bad and put ourselves among the good and others among the bad, we can never write truthful poetry. It's all false if it's based on a false premise. No doubt some people are morally better or worse than some others are, but it is necessary to see that this is not an absolute classification. Knowing that what we call evil in others also exists in ourselves at least makes it possible to write something that has some authenticity.

  DG:  .... How can the poet—feeling worldly despair—possibly go on?

GK: Who knows? Maybe the best we can do is do what we love as best we can.

gk = galway kinnell in a 2001 interview with the cortland review.

this guy is brilliant. seriously. brilliant.

if after all this time you still don't know what poetry can do to your heart, click here, read pages 75, 76, and the first segment of 79. let your life be changed.