Sad news. The Knack singer, and writer of song 'My Sharona', Doug Fieger, has died. That 1979 song was the theme of my just-pubescent junior high school years. The song was jarringly adolescent, leeringly (disconcertingly) hypersexual, and utterly catchy - it was, simply, the power pop song of the year - and is arguably, along with 'High School Confidential', one of the raunchiest ever written about the stickiness of love and desire. I loved and feared it then, and still do. It sets me going every time I hear it. While The Knack never amounted to much after that, they allowed power pop a moment in the sun, and caught the new wave cusp as the 80s began.
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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