Featured Poet: Martyn Crucefix


Eyewear is very glad to welcome British poet Martyn Crucefix(pictured) to its pages this crisp March Friday in London, the Ides of March.  Crucefix has won numerous prizes including a major Eric Gregory award and a Hawthornden Fellowship.  He has published four collections, including An English Nazareth (Enitharmon, 2004). His translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies was published by Enitharmon in 2006, shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as “unlikely to be bettered for very many years” (Magma). His new collection, Hurt, has just been published by Enitharmon.

Road

As noiseless bronzed miles

slip rapidly past

they stand in lay-bys

as if waiting in the wild

each dressed with care

in this Catholic country

though not discreetly

and this is not the city

passing one

then another

you realise slowly

the fifth or sixth time

your stare’s returned

by shaded full-on eyes

locked to your turning

the steady

rise and fall of the big engine

In their strappy tops

one clamped to a mobile

is talking to another

there is community here

as you wind through

gunning south

taking poorly-marked borders

no destination

You try staring them out

like a single shot

a bare possibility

while at speed another car

moving in the opposite direction

its driver

and her husband

barely registering

what with the young girl

in the back seat

asking every scrap

of their attention

how you pull across

how willingly you decline

the smoked silent glass

Comments

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...".

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 ...

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