La Roux's been getting too much press. It's really just a synth band duo that's been thrown from a wormhole in a back to the future sort of nostalgia trip, giving us the sort of Speak and Spell sounds that I love, but probably make most people reach for their phasers. However, if you liked Vince Clark era Depeche, then this is your moment. For my money, the two best tracks are the infinitely catchy "Colourless Colour" and "I'm Not Your Toy" (which sounds as if it was written by Prince for Ms. Easton). Eighties pastiche and homage is well and good, but how long can it be mined, like Whitby Jet, before the cliffs are bare?
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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