PERSONA NON-GRATEFUL: THE NEW ULTRAVIOLENCE ALBUM BY LANA DEL REY

In what is either a True Detective style creepy sign, or very lo-fi viral marketing, someone has scrawled the name Lana on the pavement today outside my flat in chalk, amid some occult symbols. Meanwhile, the second album from Ms Lana Del Rey, titled Ultraviolence, in a bald reference to A Clockwork Orange (she had already exhausted that other hip transgressing novel Lolita) is upon us. This is not a review - I am still taking in the deadly nightshade that is this aural intoxication - but more of a nod of assent.

Del Rey is a persona - so what? so was Oscar Wilde - and she gives good dark mood. Her interview in today's Guardian is perhaps more nihilistic than even Detective Rust, though - she claims not to want to be alive, and not to enjoy her enormous success or performing live. With ennui like that, who needs fiends? A common criticism is that her soporific melodies are attached to lyrics that are obsessively one-note: that basically they are torch songs about doomed love, and screwed up femme and homme fatales, set amid a faux America like the film sets in Day of the Locust - an American landscape of dives, diners, fast cars, gamblers, suicides, sex maniacs, addicts, bikers, bibles, guns, and video games - a shady, shaded world that seems best rendered with a sort of Monty Norman twang, and slow-dirge drumming - to call her default tone funereal is to call Poe macabre.

It is the fact that begins the interest, not that closes the coffin lid on appreciation. Unlike Poe's stories, one wants to be in Lana's - she makes woozy Californian self-destruction appealing in the way that Pulp Fiction did drug-taking and murder. It's a clearly fictional set of tropes, and she is moving them about her cross-genre chessboard slowly, black and white. There is nothing new under the sunglasses, she is saying, but to be languid, beautiful, evil, and dying is simply to be the rotting half-eaten apple in Paradise.

The core of her message is that normal life may be banal and require political engagement, but that there is a darker Sex and Death America, that, like the ear in Lynch's grass, yawns beneath the public surface, an imaginary B-movie realm we recognise and are drawn to. Because what is bad for us sometimes tastes better. This album is the sonic equivalent of Vivi in 3 Days to Kill - Amber Heard's outlandish lipstick-spy. Sure, the sex, drugs, sado-sadness and death is only cartoonish here - but so are so many of our wicked dreams.

This may not be the best novel, poetry book, short story collection, movie, TV show, or album of the year - but it comes close to offering the same illicit pleasures that such would. Good work from an ungrateful wretch, maybe, but we can thank her.

A poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

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....

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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