The last few weeks have seen an explosion of British and American indie albums that are each jostling to sound more like a band from the 80s or early 90s than the rest. The latest group to arrive with a load of fun, upbeat and quirky tunes, marked out with a slightly more inventive look and style than most, is The Joy Formidable. Their debut single, "Austere", could hardly be more of a college rock response to the Coalition cuts if it tried - its zest and punchy flavour not austere at all, confirming there is fizz still in the broken vessels of the state.
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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