Five years is a long time to be running a blog these days. Blogs are, let's face it, yesterday's news - long ago replaced by briefer and more rapid forms of intercommunication - tweets and texts. Blogs are clunky, with long tails - and arduous to update and stock full of worthwhile material. If an army travels on its stomach, so too does a blog - feed it or it fails. Why did Eyewear keep slogging away? Well, it didn't mean to - but grew like Topsy. When I started Eyewear I was a different person. It was 2005. I was not yet 40 (39), my father was still alive, as was my grandfather, uncle Jack, and mentor Robert Allen. London hadn't been attacked on the underground, nor even been awarded the 2012 Olympics. I had an MA but was just starting my doctoral research (still being completed). My best poetry books, Winter Tennis, Seaway, and Mainstream Love Hotel, were unpublished. I hadn't yet gone to Japan. Or Oman. My nephew Alex was unborn. I had just moved flats. And many disappointments and losses lay ahead, as well as a few moments of joy and contentment. I have tried to fuse very disparate elements in this blog - personal statements on death, fear, hope and frustration (but not too many), with political observations, and often silly or just frivolous appreciations of light entertainment (TV, pop music, movies), alongside more rigorous readings or comments on significant literary works; and I have also opened the blog to other voices - many featured guest poets, and reviewers. This has led to consternation in some circles: is Eyewear a magazine, a diary, or what? Does it speak with one voice, or do the police in another? Both, and more, and less. Blogs are a new form. The best of them are archived, as this is, by The British Library. I believe they will eventually wither away in popularity and ubiquity, to be replaced by very different ways of sharing ideas and thoughts everywhere immediately. Their power though is remarkable. Instanter, as Olson argued us to be, has become everyday. Will this blog slog on much longer? Maybe a little while longer, but not, I think, another 5 years. Maybe until 2012 - that'd be a nice place to end, just after the Olympic ceremonies. 2015 is what the new flashforward saw. It's the coalition's proposed election date. I may have moved on by then - but someone, somewhere, will always be wearing glasses. Looking differently.
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. What do I mean by smart?
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