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

There is a good case for arguing that 2009 is shaping up to be the most catastrophic year in world history since 1939 (the start of the second world war). Despite the "Obama effect" - now in its 101st day - the world, in '09, is currently facing the most serious economic downturn since at least 1945, and, the most dangerous pandemic threat for forty years. On top of that, ongoing environmental degradation, and all the other problems that usually confront humanity, promise to make this end of the decade a particularly nail-biting one.

Eyewear, for one, is cautiously pessimistic. A few days ago, I believed that the swine flu virus might stay confined to those who had been to Mexico, or had contact with those there - but today, and as we move to Level 5, that seems less likely. Instead, health officials are now speaking of deaths - and the only question seems to be how many zeros after the one. One is reminded of Dylan Thomas who wrote that "after the first death t…

The WHO has argued that this recent swine flu can "no longer be contained". Perhaps. But is it not more a question that the current capitalist system - which is heavily reliant on aviation - did not want restrictive measures? Consider this option - had a limit or ban on flights to and from Mexico (even Mexico City) been implemented, and enforced, for a fortnight, until the full import of the virus could be determined, none of the cases currently in Europe, including Scotland, would have occurred. And, it is possible the life of the child who has sadly just died, because on the same plane with some other British-bound tourists, could have been saved. I understand that European tourists want to get home, but transporting them back in small tubes with recycled air for nine hours is a form of slow-motion homicide (potentially). As aviation is seen to be increasingly dangerous, to our health, why is it still allowed to thrive?

Eyewear's been out and about over the weekend, and bumped into a few leading poets, and the word on the street, and in the pubs, seems to be that maybe, just maybe, the next Poet Laureate for the UK will be Roger McGough. We'll see soon enough, but at one time it seemed that either Armitage or Duffy was the shoe-in, before other intriguing options emerged, too, like Jackie Kay and Ruth Padel. McGough, who donated work to some of the Oxfam CD work I did, is a hugely popular and likable British poet, equally at home with crowd-pleasing adults and children. He would be likely to continue the energetic outreach of the Motion years - but would he be the pluralist the UK poetry scene badly needs? In America, the idea of 'Hybrid Poetry' is catching on, and a similar generational shift is required over here. However, in terms of bringing poetry to the masses, the Merseyside poet could hardly be rivalled.

Dear Eyewearers, in order to determine how often I should update my blog, which has become a hungry mouth to feed (with content), it would be very useful if you could vote in the poll. Basically, if it turns out almost no one really visits all that often, I'll wind things down soon. I have several big projects on the go, and am finding it more and more time consuming to keep Eyewear state-of-the-art.

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Susan Millar DuMars (pictured) to the Friday Poets series. She'll be reading on Monday, 27 April, at the Troubadour in London, along with some other very fine Irish poets.

She is an American writer based in Galway, Ireland, born in 1966. She received a bursary from the Irish Arts Council for her book of short stories, Stupid Slim Neck Audrey Hepburn Dreams. Susan contributes a column on the arts to the Galway Advertiser.

She is married to the poet Kevin Higgins and together they coordinate the well known Over the Edge readings series in Galway. Her recent poetry collection, Big Pink Umbrella, from Salmon, was to my mind an excellent debut, and I look forward to what she publishes next.

Her writing manages to be both artful and very true, and is therefore often quite effective. One gets the sense that here is a writer who has lived, is living, and is sharing depths of experience, generously.


Fallen 1973

Jesus - a snappy dresser
in cranberry velvet, …

One of the most influential and controversial American poets of the last thirty years - and the most famous American poet-blogger - Ron Silliman- will be reading in London on May 5, at 7 pm, at Birkbeck. An event not to be missed by anyone in the UK with even the remotest interest in contemporary US poetics, and the means to travel. I read with Silliman once, years back, in New York, at Bob Holman's venue. A very enjoyable evening.

The Thousand Dreams of JG Ballard

The 'Sage of Shepperton', JG Ballard, died on Sunday at the age of 78 after a long illness. His last published book, Miracles of Life, was a deeply moving memoir in which he reviewed aspects of his life from the vantage point of old age. It was a fascinating insight into the mind of this genius of the suburbs, who created a fictional world so complete and immersive, one was often tempted to just move there and be done with it.

However, it might be said that everything you needed to know about Ballard could already be found not in a memoir but in his novels and stories. From the heartbreaking beauty of an early tale, 'The Garden of Time', to the shattered realities of the none-more-avant-garde 'condensed novels' of The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard's world was constructed out of his experiences as a boy in wartime Shanghai, as well as his engagement - shaped by those experiences - with the post-war world he found dull yet full …

Sad news. An age has ended, with the death of one of the great visionary British novelists of the post-Orwell era. With Burgess and Burroughs, JG Ballardcan be said to have been one of the greatest darkly comic dystopian 'cult' writers of the last 60 years, inventing entirely new landscapes for a sociopathic Western society to expose and explore its drives and desires. Eyewear will be featuring a post by Patrick Chapman, one of Ballard's literary heirs, later this week.

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome the young German poet Anne Korff (pictured) this Friday - perhaps apt since her love of film dovetails with the fact that this week is the 60th anniversary of the editing of The Third Man. For those who are into auspicious numerology, this is Eyewear's 1,313th post.

Korff was born in a town next to Hannover, Germany, in 1985. In 2004 she graduated from the local secondary school and left to work and travel in England. In 2008 she graduated from Kingston University London with a First Class Bachelor Degree in Creative Writing and Film Studies. It was here that I met her, and where she impressed me greatly with the creation of a brilliant TV Bible on the golden age of Hollywood - and, of course, her poems.
They strike me as being very powerful and clever in their fusing of film and feminist theory with disturbing, sometimes erotic, and highly expressionistic verbal construction, often presented with disrupted syntax and hybridity of language - these …

Linda Black reviews
Drives
by Leontia Flynn

Leontia Flynn’s second collection Drives raises the question to what extent a troubled childhood influences creativity. According to Alice Millar such creativity 'somehow permits us to give form to the chaos within'(Pictures of Childhood). Millar rejects Freud’s notions of ‘infantile sexuality’ – his drive theory – and the Oedipal complex (referred to in one of the epigraphs to Drives) for unfairly blaming the child.

What of the parents in all this? ‘Back in his childhood were parental rows/really responsible…’ ('Robert Lowell'). ‘ A finger is pointed’ (‘Samuel Beckett’) mostly at the mother; ‘ It is inconceivable this is not to do with my mother’. In ‘Charles Baudelaire’s Mother’ he writes to her ‘I think the one of us will kill the other’. Bishop’s mother ‘won’t return from the institution’. Is the mother to blame? She certainly can’t, or didn’t, make things better; ‘… unheard and unheeded, are the cries of a blubbery child’. (…

Eyewear receives a lot of stuff it is asked to mention. I can't do it all. But somethings are too good to pass up. For one thing, this mooted book is a subject dear to my heart (Canadians in Hollywood); and, more to the point, it has one of the best titles ever.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: “Canuckifornia,” an anthology of Canadian poets writing about California, seeks submissions of individual poems or groups of up to 10 poems. Poets should be natives of Canada, former or current Canadian citizens, or former or current permanent residents of Canada. The purpose of this collection is to display a range of Canadian reactions to (and appropriations of) the myths and realities of California, a state where many expatriates have gathered. Canadians have migrated to the Golden State to pursue careers in the entertainment industry, Silicon Valley, academia and many other fields, and they have brought their own sensibilities to bear on the so-called “Golden State.” At the same time, California’s …

The recent news in the UK has been filled with the planned "smear campaign" from one of The Prime Minister's Men - a plan to use a blog to spread gossip and innuendo to destroy rival politicians in the Tory Party. Eyewear found it odd how alarmed and shocked the media was at this (a little like the Casablanca moment when Louis discovers gambling in his casino). Anyway, for poets it was no news at all - since poetry-related blogs and "listserv" networks and sites have been spreading nasty, often anonymous criticism and worse - sometimes character-assassination - for years.

A good example is this one from Poetry Snark, about me. It's pretty crass and ignorant stuff. And that's the tip of the iceberg (the Titanic sank today, in 1912). Poets sometimes claim they batter each other to hell because "the slice of the pie is so small" but that makes little sense - competition only gets nastier the more there is at stake, not the less (see presidential e…

Ben Mazer offers a close reading of
'Invitation to a Vampire'
by Clare Pollard

From the point of view of this Bostonian, (spiritually exiled in his own city! gasp!), The Wolf in London (Editor, James Byrne) has just published something marvellous in Clare Pollard's 'Invitation to a Vampire' (The Wolf, 19). Every line in this poem is delicious, independently and in context carrying the weight of an enormously permeable presence. Just what that presence is, and what it permeates, tows and squeezes emotion through an intensity of impending dread into the heart of desire. The poem leaves nothing in its wake, seemingly swallowing up existence itself with its weird words.

The epigraph from Bram Stoker is worth saving for after. The poem truly begins in mid-flight—

Whirlpools of gulls whip over harbour—
clou ds of yellow eyes—
and the stone sea's fearsome, melted
and roused to terrible passion.


These inseminating 'Whirlpools&…

Christopher Hortonreviews
Keeping Time
byTim Dooley

Tim Dooley’s book Keeping Time, his first full length collection since 1985, and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, appears to be less about keeping time and more about what occurs when you miss a beat to transcend the prevalent zeitgeist. Often, the characters in these poems are found caught between the orthodoxies of mundane post-industrial life and the urge to cut loose from the ‘rat race’ – the poems 'Out', 'Edit' and 'a Salesman in the Lakes' might all be cited as examples of this. In 'Out', for example, Lucille who has seemingly been laid off from her job, embarks on a winding journey of the east of England, then finally, the coast, where the sheer vividness of the natural world infers epiphany: ‘where oyster catchers dive for food/ and the diamond-glittering, brown-and-grey-skinned seals,/ swivel and swim between sand bank and arctic sound’.

Journeying is also important to Dooley and a number of …

The Times has run an impressive article, singling out a few (ten) younger British poets, for attention. As I recently included or mentioned several of these same poets in my Manhattan Review section, such as James Byrne, Joe Dunthorne, Luke Kennard, and Emily Berry, I can only concur, and in fact, welcome such a focus on them. However, I cannot help but feel there is something a tad disingenuous about the "Facebook poets" tag that has been applied here. Not by the poets themselves, I hasted to add. As with "The Movement" tag, this is a media label.

I am the co-founder of the original "Poetry" group at Facebook, with over 6,000 members - and I can tell you, while poetry circulates via that leviathan, it does so at a snail's pace; few real poets post work online. Facebook mostly reps mediocre poetry; it is superb for advertising events, magazines, contests, etc. - and in that way only is this "generation" of under 35-year-olds shaped poetically…

Christ has risen, but not, it seems, in secular England. A quick look at the terrestrial TV listings for this long holiday weekend reveal no stone has been unturned, to present any even vaguely religious, uplifting, or redemptive shows. Where are any of the great Biblical TV or film epics of old? Or a family musical? Beyond the wasteland of cringingly-secular TV, turn to the pages of The Sunday Times - whose pages make no mention that this is the holiest day of the year for Anglicans and Catholics - hardly a complete minority of readers. Instead, lewd stories of brothels in Nazi-occupied France, and the latest sleaze from the Gordon Brown inner circle (which looks increasingly Nixonian) are paraded before us.

What has happened to England, and, more generally, to the UK? Its churches are half-empty - and so are its poetry readings. I see a connection (Eyewear always does, of course) between the ebbing of the sea of faith, and the decline in an interest in poems. Consider how many of the…

What was the dominant trend or style of popular music in the 00s? Clearly, the digital explosion of "myspace" guitar bands like The Arctic Monkeys, - and albums online, like In Rainbows, and the developing complexity of dance and pop music (one thinks of Britney Spears) and the ongoing importance of rap (L'il Wayne). Then again, the rise of Freak Folk; or such acoustic bands and signers, like Bon Iver and The Fleet Foxes. Also, the treated voice (Kayne West, Fever Ray) and the return of synth-pop.

Anyway, the last year of this decade has begun impressively, with several albums released since January 1st that are among the strongest since 2000, and will certainly be among many critics' end of year lists. If the trend for 2009 continues, this may be the decade that ends with a musical bang.

Eyewear wants to suggest the top seven albums so far, in no order, as he's heard them (and this excludes mixed but sometimes interesting new works from Springsteen, Doves and Depe…