Watching the ITV special last night on Duran Duran - timed for their launch this morning of their 13th album, produced by Mark Ronson, hep-cat du jour - I couldn't help thinking: these guys have staying power. Indeed, as we all know now, Duran Duran have been going, with hits and misses, for 30 years. This is five times longer than The Beatles, or The Doors. Of course, The Stones keep on. However, it is true to say that it is mainly the 80 bands - once derided - who have managed to turn their names into brands, and their styles into perennial favourites. The 80s is the new 60s - it favours nostalgic recovery. Ronson is the man for that. Duran Duran, like Depeche Mode and maybe one or two other 80s bands (The Smiths for instance) created a new genre, more or less, with their sound. The Duran Duran song is bombastic, hedonistic, optimistic, and, yes, poetic. It is like no other - and usually more textured and complex than one might think. Their main themes - exotica, danger, sexuality, travel, fashion, and scopophilia - are those of the 70s French erotic films they were no doubt influenced by. Is this a great album, a new Rio? It seems too much a homage to the earlier work to quite reach that level, but it is a labour of love, and 'Leave a Light On' is as good as 'Ordinary World'. 'Mediterranea' is their 5-star spa credo. 'Girl Panic!' is a dance-floor classic manque. What makes Duran Duran sickening pap to some, their plastic bombast, their eternal yearning, has become a legitimate stamp of a period - the po-mo pop they defined. This is a major restatement of that moment.
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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