Forget the Vaccines. The most exciting guitar band in the UK now (no, not more landfill indie) is likely the Palma Violets - they only have one single out, really, but the NME hype machine is chugging overtime on them. Okay, but this time it is deserved. Fully fresh, and yet resonant with a variety of traditional tropes as if plucked from The Smiths, The Ramones and The Replacements, 'Best of Friends' manages to become, in its classic 3 minutes and thirty-three seconds, one of the best indie guitar songs of the 21st century. Full stop.
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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