The xx has won this year's Mercury prize. Eyewear has long appreciated this band - well, since they came out a little over a year ago. The xx are the most sonically original British band in a decade, and perhaps the most melodically spare and intriguing - by marrying post-punk guitars to an urban spoken delivery (that also echoes Lou Reed) they manage to represent the traditions of The Beatles, The Smiths, Nirvana, but also the current dark landscape. Their debut album is awfully beautiful, very haunting, and keeps a curious distance - emotive but cool, like Portishead was. This is an example of timeless artistry, that, whatever they do next, cannot stale.
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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