Featured Poet: Angela Readman

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Angela Readman (pictured) this first Friday of sultry July, poised as it is on the tip of potential Andy Murray victory at Wimbledon, and the verge of World Cup loss and triumph tonight and this weekend. London is buzzing under the relatively pounding, neo-LA sun of this past week. Readman's (what an ideal name for a poet!) poetry collection Strip is published by Salt Publishing.

Following her MA, she won The Biscuit International Poetry Competition and The Ragged Raven sequence competition. Her work has been published in pamphlets by Diamond Twig, Iron and Ek Zuban (translated into Finnish) and in magazines including Ambit, Envoi, Dreamcatcher, Mslexia, Laura Hird's site and Freida Hughes' poetry column in The Times. Yet another compelling member of the YBP generation, Readman is a talent to keep watching.

How to Make Love Not Like a Porn Star

Teach me to not make love like a porn star,

make me a bed that has nothing to prove. Let’s laugh

at unscripted noises; let’s not care what it looks like.

Make my body forget what it knows.

Let me breathe in and out to the fit of your hands.

Let me let myself not always be camera ready.

Show me a picture of me not ‘doing a Marilyn Monroe.’

Let me see that your eyes are not apertures.

Let’s sink to cliché, let your eyes be rock pools;

I hitch up my skirt and wade in, reach down to return

dirty finger-nailed, with a fistful of small shiny stones.

Teach me to close my eyes without making them.

Teach me to expect no result, zoom in for no reason

on the cleavage of your chin my pinkie fits in.

Let us not talk about the size of anything.

Teach me to listen, find a gasp in your hello,

how you make it sound like the first line in a tall tale.

Let your tongue be a silver river. Teach me to sail.

Let there be hair. Let’s mention things that aren’t hard.

Let my breasts look unlikely in your fisherman’s hands,

the blister from toast like snow globes I find myself in.

Let us wake with limbs tangled as Chinese puzzles,

and garlic bread by the bed. Open your eyes, lashes

like footprints of snow-laden birds; let me pull off the sleep.

poem by Angela Readman

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...".

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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