Eyewear is jumping ahead a bit. On the 24th, Saturday, it'll be the 20 year anniversary, as we all know, of Nevermind, universally regarded (now) as the single most important popular music album of the 1990s, a true generational watershed moment. I still remember the first time I heard it, in 1991, at an October house party, in Montreal. It was on in the background. I was drinking a beer, talking to a guy in an untucked flannel lumberjack-style shirt, and we both stopped and said - hey, this is f***ing good. Soon, I had bought the CD, and was playing it all day. I was lifting weights then, at my Verdun apartment, and used to keep it on in the background; and it became the soundtrack to my personal life, for a while. Sure, the rest of the story gets a little boring, soon enough - the loser club death, the wasted genius. But Cobain and Co. created a few tracks the aural equivalent of The Beatles. Truly great stuff, that belonged only to us - people then in their 20s. Of course, that makes me 45, which sort of sucks, but it was good to have our own sound, not the 60s. I should add, I still think Pixies and Smashing Pumpkins come close to Nirvana at times. But name another album where each of the 12 songs is a classic. Don't bother.
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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