New Poem by Jeffrey Wainwright

Eyewear is very pleased, as part of its 5th-birthday celebrations, to welcome a new poem by Jeffrey Wainwright. He is the author of many collections from Carcanet, including Selected Poems and Clarity or Death!, as well as the Routledge Poetry: The Basics (which I happily use for all my teaching).

Swimming Is The Answer

Swimming is the answer, notwithstanding Chairman Mao.
There, that strikes an attitude. What on earth
do I mean? Well, if water ever was our element
it is no longer, yet its foreignness feels welcoming.
It is the sense of suspension and of clothing
at its simplest and most complete.
Admittedly it is escape, nothing to do with here above
except for drawing off the empty air – and maybe
it is blameworthy to embrace such muffling,
such coddling, which brings me on to Chairman Mao,
the Great Unmuffler, Pilot of Reality
for whom the world was full of answers,
one such that swimming is resurrection:
‘You thought me dead? Look seven miles
down the Yangtse, pick the bones out of that.’
But did he swim or just float downstream?
Was that indeed his head singing? Hence the ‘notwithstanding’,
that and the bones.

poem by Jeffrey Wainwright

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. What do I mean by smart?

"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

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