Patrick Chapman, Irish poet, has brought this to my attention: a very good online discussion and interview surrounding the 30th anniversary of one of the greatest of the 80s albums - synth-pop/avant-garde hybrid, Architecture & Morality, by OMD. OMD have fascinated me since, well, at least 1980 or so, when I was 14. I'd never heard music like this - it had the pop nous of The Beatles, but was cerebral, solemn, eerie, and profoundly serious, as well as being emotive. Perhaps my PhD research into British poetic styles of the 1940s started here - for OMD certainly manage to fuse melodrama and the rational, in a romantic-classical mix that would have pleased a young Nicholas Moore. The album's opening track, 'The New Stone Age' remains one of my all-time favourite songs - Misha Glouberman first played it for me in Westmount on a snowy Sunday morning, after waking up in his home after a party. It felt like a revelation. "Oh my God, what have I done this time?" strikes me as one of the finest lines in all pop music - haunting, faintly comical, but also potentially theological in its implications. Meanwhile, 'Sealand', the song about the industrial plant near Liverpool, is so estranging, and ominous, it must count as one of the oddest fourth-track songs ever. Not to mention the two Joan of Arc songs. For those too young (or old) to have heard this on its release thirty years ago, do check it out now.
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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My step-children descended yesterday so may I grab this opportunity to wish you and your wife an extremely happy Christmas.
Best wishes from Simon & Rusty