In keeping with the theme of 5 - 5 years of Eyewear's four-eyed stance - I would like to announce THE EYEWEAR PRIZE. There will be five prizes - a winner and four runners-up, for best poem. Each poet may submit five poems. POETS MAY BE ANY AGE OR FROM ANY NATION. Poems must be no longer than 50 lines. Poems must not have previously been published or appeared online, in magazines, or in any book or pamphlet. Poems should be in the English language and submitted electronically as word documents. Poems should refer, if possible, to eyewear, and the number five, though this is merely a whimsical restraint that excellent poems on any theme need not fear. Submission is free. I will be the judge, and will wear glasses at all times during the rigorous adjudication process. Email poems to me at toddswift at clara dot co dot uk. The prize will be the sheer thrill and honour of being the winner of THE EYEWEAR PRIZE. All 5 winners will be featured at the site, and grant first internet rights for publication of their winning work online. Deadline for submission: August 5th, 2010. The winners will be announced October 5th, 2010. Each poet may only win once, even if seeing double. Eyewear reserves the right to declare no winners if entries of insufficient quality are entered. Entrance into this literary competition in no way establishes a legal or commercial or comical or indeed chemical bond between Eyewear, its editors, or the writers involved. Viva eyewear!
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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