I hadn't seen the video for this when I fell in love with the song from this New York duo - but you won't believe me once you've seen it, as its love letter to Soho burlesque is quite risque. The song itself is that sort of gothy electropop pomp that Florence & The Machine do so well; but here, I feel it is done even better. I like "beautiful dance that happened by chance" and "leave the soul alone" as lyrics, among other pleasures to be found littered about this song.
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....
Comments