La Roux may win this year's Mercury. For those not based in Britain, the Mercury prize is a bit like a Grammy for indie musical artists. While a recent Eyewear post teased La Roux, it is true that her album has a number of catchy pop tunes, and, among all the recent acts paying pastiche-based homage to their more famous peers and earlier styles, she's actually very good. It seems a shame the White Lies album isn't included; as for the news that Florence and the Machine is a tipped favourite - well, it hasn't grown on me, yet, has Lungs. Both Lungs, and the new Bats for Lashes sound very much like Sarah McLachlan, who was one of the most influential indie acts of the 90s - and whose emotive portentous style has become deeply embedded in the DNA of so many acts since. McLachlan was great, but it's becoming a tired style. Or am I just really getting too old to maintain enthusiasm for pop? Today on the BBC, I listened to a very good programme on Eliot. At the end, when he read from The Four Quartets, the austere serious beauty of the words seemed more lasting, and more potent, and more genuinely good, than much music.
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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