The Soft Pack's eponymous album is a garage rock classic. As such, it is both utterly lacking in innovation, and crudely compelling. They do it well, and what they do is simple and onrushing. We all know the antecedents of this mainly North American phenomenon, and we know that anyone who name checks this style has The Seeds, Iggy Pop, and The Ramones in their closet, as well as early REM. And indeed, this California band has all of that going on. The fifth track, "Pull Out", had me dancing in my living room today, not something a moderately depressed person usually does. It's that fun, that good, that dumb. There are and will be more complex, multicultural, and surprising albums this year. Not sure there will be one more addictively visceral.
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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