Modern Poetry and the Tradition

I am back from Wales, where I read poems with the poet Chris Kinsey, at the Oriel Davies Gallery (www.orieldavies.org) in Newtown, and then spent another day book-buying at Haye-on-Wye; and then later, in the drawing room of a Victorian fishing lodge(Pwll-y-Faedda) on the banks of the salmon-rich river, read Yvor Winters.

The gallery reading went well - perhaps 45 or so in attendance. The exhibition was of modern British art, 1900-1950, and a Wyndham Lewis of Ezra Pound was to my left (ironically) as I read. Kinsey's work was vivid, rich in imagery, and well-delivered; she was able to connect each of her poems to a painting in the gallery, as she lives nearby.

Haye-on-Wye, as may have been said (if not consider it coined here), is to book shops what Venice is to canals. The best has to be Chris and Melanie Prince's The Poetry Bookshop which is on Brook Street; nicely, I found Cleanth Brooks there - namely, a first edition of Modern Poetry and the Tradition, published in 1939 (!) in Chapel Hill.

Cleanth must be one of the most beautiful names in the English language.

I am currently apalled yet revived by reading Winters. His precise attention to certain strictures whets the mind's dull knife in this age of celebrity and the inflated blurb. His meter is moral and exact. And his claims often patently absurd.

It seems a different age in which someone could (try to) dispel Yeats with an essay - and one that is also refreshingly alternative and eccentric.

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IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

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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...".

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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

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