About 25 years ago, on June 16, 1986, the third album from The Smiths - the greatest British band of the 1980s (Pixies are the American equivalent) - was released in England. It was called The Queen Is Dead. And it is without doubt (still, evermore) one of the finest popular music albums ever released. The thrumming, drumming insistence of the first (title) track is deliriously potent, with its great lament: "life is very long when you're lonely". 'Frankly, Mr. Shankly' is still the best monologue of a mediocre talent put to music, and is Morrissey's riposte to Larkin's 'Mr. Bleaney'; and ends with the wonderful "give us money." In the middle, come two of the great Smith moments - 'Cemetery Gates' ("Wilde is on my mine") - which I loved - and then the extraordinarily weird 'Bigmouth Strikes Again" ("sweetness I was only joking when I said/ by rights you should be bludgeoned in your bed"), invigorating, nasty, brilliant; I was taken out of a Montreal disco on a stretcher, after dislocating my kneecap dancing to this song. At track nine is 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' ("to die by your side, well the pleasure, the privilege is mine"), with its darkened underpass - whose strange fear summed up all the passion and pathos of adolescent longing. Stamped throughout with melancholy-witty pop genius, this is frankly one of the best British things of the last century. A pleasure that won't ever go out.
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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