No artist's long playing debut in 2012 was more anticipated, or instantly derided, than Ms. Del Rey's. The faux auteur slash bad girl singer-songwriter emerged fully grown from the fused pages of Kubrick's Lolita, and Lynch's Blue Velvet, as she was keen to tell us. She was as staged as the Monroe photo where she "reads" Ulysses. Lana's trope abuse was impressive - she wrung the last bit of blood from Jimmy Dean's broken body, basically speedballing Hollywood Babylon for the meme generation. As if deriving all her source material from Love and Death in The American Novel, she has continued to find links between the diseased poetics at the heart of an evil, carnal, eternal American Gothic sublime, and the bubblegum pink ecstasies of teen America: as if Minnie Mouse was a pornstar, or Sylvia Plath had slept with Howard Hughes under contract for his film company she combines the American DNA we all know and love, but usually keep separate - as such, she is the new airbrusher deluxe - that Hefner once was to middle America, so now is Lana. She excites and soothes at once - saying it is okay to love sex and death. Holier Thanatos, indeed. Born To Die the album is a strange, fruity masterwork - so camp it comes with its own lake. Many of its songs are flawed classics - both inert and clumsy, but also literary and artificial in a way that I welcome, as I welcome the poetry of David Trinidad. I have chosen 'Born To Die', finally, as the song to represent her, but half a dozen of hers would have done; though it lacks her sense of humour it does show her darker more portentous side.
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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