E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG BY TODD SWIFT

Eyewear's mostly pro-Anglican leanings buckle, but don't break (O my chevalier), on reading the news a good man's been hounded from the priesthood for a gay marriage that's perfectly right and meet. As has been argued here before at these pages, it's a tragic misreading and misuse of Scripture to argue against full tolerance of love that dares to tie the knot. What's sacred are the vows, not the genders, involved.

I'm reading in Reading with the hirsute performance poet A.F. Harrold on the 20th of June, 2008, at the Poets' Cafe; come for 8 pm.

I was in Cambridge on the weekend, browsing for books in Heffers, and came across The Face Of It, the latest (2007) collection of poems from R.F Langley, pictured, now in his 70th year. I'd say Langley was one of contemporary poetry's best kept secrets, though his work is known and loved by many; in some ways, his current reputation is analagous to two other Carcanet poets, C.H. Sisson, and F.T. Prince - both late or neo- modernist in style, poet's poets, and really deserving of a wider readership. I've bought the new Langley, and look forward to reading it this summer. His style is wonderfully cursive, bending around corners, swooping and darting in fresh circumstances.

The Irish have voted against the Lisbon Treaty for EU enhancement. Pity. They benefited from it for so long, it might have been considerate to continue to support it now.

Eyewear isn't the only Quixote in town. David Davishas been mainly branded a Quixotic loser by the British press, since beginning his one man crusade against 42-day detention. What's curious is to see how such a principled stand is being played out in the UK. British papers often wax lyrical about "American style politics" - but when it emerges in their own backyard, they balk, puzzled, or disconcerted by the "loose canon" in their midst.

British social and political life is still often governed by rigid codes of decorum, and breaking ranks, even to voice something good or necessary, is tantamount to going "mad", or becoming "unreliable". No wonder it is so difficult to voice well-meaning opposition in the UK, without becoming quickly marginalised. One is meant to "work within the system" - even if, as Davis proposes, that system has failed everyone. It's sad to see a brave, decent man so quickly pilloried. The press might h…

Chris Kinsey (pictured here) is one of the poets Eyewear believes deserves more attention for her unusual and often unexpectedly powerful poems.

She received an Arts Council of Wales writer’s award in 2000. This enabled her to give up her day job and focus on writing and rescuing greyhounds. She derives much inspiration from living a long time in a small town, and from Welsh landscapes.

Her poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies, such as In the Criminal’s Cabinet & Reactions 3 & 4. Her first collection, Kung Fu Lullabies came out from Ragged Raven Press in 2004.


Sighting

We turn our backs
on window-shopping and sales
walk away from town.

Seven drakes, heads and necks
green from dipping the depths,
scull the slow bend.

A willow leans from pale chippings.
Old saw wounds are a quiver
of amber arrows.

At a gap in the alders
the weir makes water back flip.
We watch stones grow beards.

A whistle shrills us heron-still.
Before we tune to its signal
our eyes see a dart so swift

th…

No other single poet-critic is arguably as important for post-war British poetry (not even Empson, Alvarez , Hamilton or Heaney) as Veronica Forrest-Thomson, one of the eccentric geniuses that the UK seems to produce every so often. To simplify, she took Wittgenstein's ideas about language and the world, and applied them to the language games within poetic practice. Her influence on the alternative poetic traditions of the British isles is immense - indeed, she also inspired CharlesBernstein and the "Language poets" of America (her Introduction to Poetic Artifice lays the groundwork for his Artifice of Absorption, when she writes, "all norms of other kinds of discourse are changed when absorbed by a poem"). Alison Mark's Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry is a good place to start, for those who want to read more.

So, here's the question, how come it is so hard to locate copies of her brilliant, significant masterwork, Poetic Artifice? Does anyo…

Posters are all over London, featuring two beautiful young starlets, for the new movie The Edge Of Love, opening in Britain on the 20th of June. Nowhere do the posters suggest that the protagonist, and main theme of the film, is Dylan Thomas. At some point, Eyewear will want to review the film. For now, what's telling is how the people behind the marketing campaign (probably grosser versions of mediocre Lee McQueen) thought it best to hide, rather than share, the poetry at the heart of this romantic biopic.

Ironically, Dylan Thomas may (just barely) be one of the only modern poets the average cinemagoer can still name. And, his life of apparent drink and erotic encounters (or erotic encounters with drink), is hardly of zero interest in the time and place of Amy Winheouse et al. Anyway, this marks another low point in poetry's intersection with mass culture. The fact that a key element of the film, the poet's attempt to get the law to punish a drunken accidental gunman, has …

David Davishas done something new in British politics today. His resignation, on principle, with a plan to refight for his seat as an MP, against the 42-day limit for arrest under new government "anti-Terror" legislation, isn't the usual parliamentary tactic, and seems, further, to have caught even David Cameron off-guard. Davis is in uncharted, and mostly unsupported, waters here. On the one hand, he may be admired for sticking to his guns, or mocked or more for gesture politics. If he wins, he may be better placed to challenge Cameron, at some point, for leadership of his party; a loss could signal oblivion, or some sort of quasi-obscure UKIP identity. What matters, though, is this act is dramatic, and calls attention to the authoritarian heartbeat of Brown's horrific government.

In architecture, and in plastic arts such as painting and design, Britain leads the world, in innovation - and high-profile, and controversial - prizes, often connected to handsome cash payouts. The Turner Prize is a leading example. Critics of these prizes tend to argue the gongs and nods go to the more experimental, cutting-edge, and contemporary practitioners - and not those who support more traditional, even outdated, modes. Not so in the British poetry world, where the key prizes - TS Eliot, Forward, and Costa spring to mind - are almost always given to good, traditional, mainstream poets. In otherwords, and perhaps paradoxically, it is the innovators who tend to be excluded. Now, I am sure these innovative writers likely don't ask their presses (Barque, say, or Reality Street) to submit their work, all the time - and there is a legitimate oppositional tendency among the experimentalists that would, I think, tend to recommend against the giving of such awards - however, as Th…

Dear me. A Montreal writer has got his hands on my latest collection, and found a whiff of the undergraduate about it. I'd suggest any critic who uses phrases like "dorm-room touches" has a bit of spring break fever themselves. Anyway, it's an interesting, violently mixed review. As the reviewer writes: "The voice which might have knit these elements together into a powerful whole seems, as yet, to lack confidence in what it is attempting to say." Well, yes, except what the poems are saying is that the idea of one voice, and one powerful whole, remains elusive, for poems, for texts - especially in bleak midwinter. However, the "excess" of reference to other authors in the collection (and other figures, in general, from Hirohito, to Brando) was intentional, and valedictory. I happen to think allusion and homage are viable poetic tropes - and excess is also, at times, a literary option. Many conservative Montreal critics tend to want poetry to be au…

Since I do like some popular culture, and I understand the need for exuberance and light-hearted joy in life, it feels churlish to review a Coldplay album with too much gravity. However, three things have arisen in connection to the new album, that require comment. The first is the use of the Brian Enocard (genius producer reinventing a band's sound); the second is the general response so far from reviewers, which has tended to suggest the album is so-so (a three star state) but no barn-burner; and the third is the idea that bands like Coldplay are, in any meaningful way, able to finetune, or even transform, their "sound" - raising the critical issue, can style be more than fashion, can style be purposeful? I think it can be (Talking Heads had sonic shifts of note; as did The Beatles; as did Scott Walker).

Well, firstly, Eno's mainly a hack by now. His works such as My Life in the Bush of Ghosts are masterful, and significant. His work with U2 was formative. By now, i…

Osprey, a thriving new Scottish online journal, has a new issue out. Bird lovers everywhere, have a look.

A recent anonymous message to Eyewear reads:

"Todd, enough already with the Quixotic tilts and generalisations aimed at the perceived poetry establishment in the UK. How do you know how well known Blaser is or not here? Are we really expected to know all poets from around the world, even those of waist-deep in this business. How up are you on Filipino poetry, or NZ poetry, for example? How many North American poets have heard of Morgan? Had you before you came here?As for 'a measure of the insularity of Britain's main gate-keepers of poetry', that's camp hyperbole - take it out of eye-scratching code and say what you mean. Do you think he should have been invited here to do readings, that he warrants a Faber edition - let us know rather than bark. Who exactly are these 'gate keepers'? Why exactly are they insular?"

Notice the aggrieved tone. I marvel at how selectively people who read blogs read them - never bothering to trace the history of a blog, or …

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Tim Dooley(pictured) this Friday. Dooley has taught in and near London since 1974. He has reviewed poetry for the TLS, and has worked as a creative writing tutor for Arvon, Writers’ Inc and The Poetry School. His first collection The Interrupted Dream was published by Anvil in 1985. This was followed by The Secret Ministry (2001) and Tenderness (2004), both winners in the Poetry Business pamphlet competition. Tenderness was also a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice.

Dooley read for the Oxfam poetry series, and appears on Life Lines 2. As a critic, and reviewer, Dooley has long had an eye and ear open to possibilities in poetry and music from across the pond (writing on Ashbery, for instance, as long ago as 1982, in an issue of Poetry Review, and following Bob Dylan's work closely) but he is also aware of British lyric traditions - and this is how the tenderness enters his work - which is often humane, and subtly attentive to linguistic nuance and i…

The Canadian Griffin Prize for poetry has recently been awarded to two very deserving poets: Robin Blaser won the Canadian prize, and the international prize (both for best book of the year in their respective categories) went to John Ashbery. Both poets are (wonderfully) octogenarians, inspiration to all poets of all ages. Ashbery noted that he'd listened happily to CBC radio as a boy (as did I) which was a lovely aside. It is a measure of the insularity of Britain's main gate-keepers of poetry that Blaser is little known in the UK, if at all, except by a few, and Ashbery continues to be something of a guilty pleasure. Just last year, for instance, the TS Eliot panel passed up the opportunity to shortlist his latest Carcanet collection (the same panel failed to award genius Edwin Morgan the top prize). Well, Ashbery's one of the two or three finest living poets, whose music is hard to shake once heard. Glad Canada's on the ball.

The Guardianonline has noticed Eyewear had a literary debate with Sean Bonney, recently, and mentions it within the context of literary feuds. It's a fun article, and good to see.

However, the criticism in the post, that I sometimes write on this blog in a sort of postgraduate-speak misses the point: sometimes I do, sometimes I don't - and the flexibility not to have to speak like a mouthpiece for Comrade Stalin, or Adorno trashing Jazz, is the difference in the world between those who think Goethe was a rebel or a philistine. He, was, of course, both. Hence, complicated, and neither.

Eyewear believes poetry can be, variously, fun, engaged, and postmodern in its reference to pop culture - but it doesn't have to be. Poet-critics like Bonney have a bee in their bonnet about what Poetry Has To Be. Such diktats don't do poets, or poems, any good.

Poetry should be ethically engaged, indeterminate, linguistically innovative, or lyric - as it wants. Style is the key. Better to r…

Brain cancer has been in the news a lot lately. My father had the fastest-acting kind, and it killed him within two years of diagnosis, after his initial seizures. He had, as most people do, near-immediate surgery, followed by chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and then more surgery.

This form of cancer is meant to be rare (1 in 300,000 or fewer get it) but it is increasing, due to "environmental factors", that I believe will one day be traced, if not to mobile telephony, then other aspects of our contemporary techno-saturated world. This week, fashion genius Yves Saint Laurent died of brain cancer, and Ted Kennedy went in for surgery to remove his tumour, which is apparently of the more aggressive variety.

Researchers now suggest they have discovered a virus that may cause the disease, and have developed a vaccine that could halt the spread of brain cancer - and already extends life by another year or more. 33% more life, faced with brain cancer, is the sort of near-miracle t…

Alistair Noonreviews
Backward Turning Sea
by Kelvin Corcoran

The seedlings of Kelvin Corcoran’s latest full-length collection are the poems "Helen" and "Helen Mania" from his New and Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2004), a book praised in the Guardian for the "simple magnificence" of its lines. The two Helen poems have subsequently grown into the extended version of Helen Mania published as a pamphlet in Peter Riley’sPoetical Histories, and made Poetry Book Society Choice in 2005.

The growth of this book seems to have been engineered using a genome mapped out by Basil Bunting, whose stint as a spy in Persia is the subject of one of the poems here. In Bunting’s magnum opus Briggflatts, sonata form is applied to the mid-length poem: themes of home and travel, age and youth are developed and recapitulated, and “something different” – the dream of Alexander the Great – interposed in the middle of five movements.

Corcoran applies a similar kind of structuring not to a …

Eyewear would like to congratulate Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee for the 2008 presidential race in America, for finally reaching the "magic number" that will, hopefully, lead him to The White House within half a year or so. He's charismatic, and inspiring, and reminiscent of Kennedy (contra Nixon).

Now, he needs to articulate a foreign policy that is strong enough to offset his Republican rival, but broadminded enough to bury the Bush doctrines of imbecilic go-it-alonism. Role for Clinton? Hard to say - she's both liability and helpmate - much like a ship's anchor (much depends on the weather, for the need). Sail on, ship of state, sail on!