The summer of 2010 offers more YouTubeable "music video" pleasures than a boy from the 80s like me could have imagined, when Frankie was all the rage on MTV. "Love The Way You Lie" starring Megan Fox and Dominic Monaghan is striking, not least for the way it pressures ideas of American irony in popular culture ("I like the way it hurts" is either sick or ironic or both). Upping the visual ante is the Abbaesque "Alejandro", which brilliantly manages to combine all the Spanish provocations of Un Chien Andalou with the Erotica eroism of Madonna at her best - and makes the slinky use of latex in dance a must (Ms. Gaga borrows heavily from the stomping and bed antics of Quebec dance pieces like Joe, and choreographers like Edouard Lock). Then there is the joyful summer fun of "Pack Up" by Eliza Doolittle. And, better than all of this, is the female second coming of the master sex machine himself, James Brown, in the shape of Janelle Monae's utterly compelling "Tightrope", with a dance set in a bizarre sci-fi insane ward featuring Malcolm X-type hipsters shimmying amid the electro-shock corridors. Music, image, and text, in 2010, may be digitally finger-tip present and accounted for, but it is surely superbly imaginative and fascinating. The present is as good as it gets, is now, and makes most poetry seem lame and less-than-thrilling. Frank O'Hara once said movies are better than most poetry. He would now say, surely, that digiclips present the new delightful competition. Give it up?
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....
Comments