Nothing much left to say. The obvious things - her joining the "stupid club" of musical self-destructive genuises of 27 who die young of excess - the tragic waste - the talent - were obvious. The moment I saw the news, though, I was shaken. Amy Winehouse, unlike Adele, actually was a genius - a genuinely troubled soul, with the ability to sing her heart out. The Beatles had Martin; she had Ronson. She declined almost as soon as she reached the heights in 2006. Five years was a long time to falter in public, and her missing out on the Bond theme, and the broken promises and failed rehab stints, as well as the late-night punch ups and fall-downs began to create a counter-canon of pathos, or bathos. What I cannot accept is that no one cared enough to intervene and put a stop to the ruinous life mistakes. Too many of the tweeting names who apparently loved here are hedonistic night-livers with one foot in the grave themselves, up to their necks in dope and crack. Conductors of chaos, they could no more get her off those tracks than halt the engines of excess; those closest to her egged her on, more than they carried her away, to a safer, saner, environment. So - we have a handful of classic songs, likely to be standards, and a myth that's been made. What we don't have is a living person, anymore, who could have sung to us for far longer, under better circumstances. Fade to Black.
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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I spent this afternoon playing Amy Winehouse's first album Frank. I was going to follow it up with her second, Back to Black but I felt too depressed to continue. It's all just a senseless waste of life, talent, and everything else positive or optimistic.
Best wishes from Simon