Featured Poet: Mary-Jane Newton

Eyewear is very glad to welcome the Hong Kong poet Mary-Jane Newton (pictured) to its pages this gray London Friday. Newton was born in Goa in 1983, and spent the first years of her life in India. She subsequently grew up in Germany and England. Her work has been published in literary journals and anthologies in Asia. Of Symbols Misused (Proverse Hong Kong), her first collection of poetry, is forthcoming shortly. She is an editor at Oxford University Press.

Poem No 165

Wants to remain unknown, unwritten. Wants to cry hoarsely that this

is not the death it has deserved.

Would rather inject its host with poison

and turn pale and waxen, than assume shape, become ‘meaningful’, be forced

into a pattern strange and peregrine.

Would rather age and rot an unborn

virgin, be forgotten like an age-old monument.

Would rather drown in other

stories, tales and poems, or be hanged with rattling emotion.

Would rather

seek a private battle with its host, than be told, captured with words. Being

captured with words means to search for the cross on the map, and searching for

the cross on the map means to take the first step on a course inevitable. Broken,

blackened stumps of feet would scratch the paper, and a thrumming sound

would pump from every cranny, every letter. Marauding feet would rush.

The journey would unfold in a thousand winding courses. In every turn and

every syllable, change would brood like the dark twin of death.

Would rather

crumble into fragments, black and ominous and blurred by memory, rather shift

into a dream of greed and violence, or grow into a different being altogether.

Wants to pivot, tighten, growl in suicidal rage: ‘Go on then, stunt, distort and warp

me with your useless, little language!’

Wants to remain a secret, wants to remain

true.

---

Xue-Li[1]

comes as if it was
today, this morning

Koi[2]-tailed eyes
and long, black hair
fool’s gold in a

summer’s
lake

Xue-Li, water runs
(sun splashes)
on her back pearls
sighs for hunger,

licks her breast

but sadly dumb as bone
a sorry little simpleton

bobbing head on a stake
grunting gastric tubes

bla-bla-blabbering
if only we could

tell by Koi-tailed
eyes the depth

of our
intellects ...

[1] Chinese female name, literally translated ‘pure as snow’

[2] Variety of the common carp. In Asia considered attractive, and often kept for decorative purposes.

poems by Mary-Jane Newton; republished with permission of the author.

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....

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise...

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

Search This Blog