Featured Poet: Michael McKimm

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Michael McKimm (pictured) this blustery October evening in London. He was born in Belfast in 1983 and grew up near the Giant's Causeway. He graduated from the Creative Writing Programme at the University of Warwick in 2004 and won an Eric Gregory award in 2007. He lives in London.

His poetry is published in various journals and anthologies, including Best Irish Poetry in English 2010 (edited by Matthew Sweeney), and he reviews regularly for The Warwick Review. His first collection of poetry is Still This Need (Heaventree Press, 2009).

In autumn 2010 Michael is British Council Writer-in-Residence at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, USA.

Summer Exhibition

or winter, it’s hard to tell. There’s a golden

swatch that suggests the sun going down

in August, but also a texture like silver-birch,

a nudge towards a cold evening, peat fires

burning, a murmur over a pint, boats wrapped

and tied fast to the harbour; a settling squall.

But if the light is totalling high summer you can

imagine kayaking to Glashedy or Tory Island,

guided past currents by boisterous porpoises,

watching the crab catch come in, bartering

for the freshest fish on the pier, grilling outdoors.

Either way, it will be blowing a gale up there,

the sort that shakes you to your senses.

Either way, it draws in the eye, it welcomes.

(‘Malin Head’, Norman Butler, RA)

poem by Michael McKimm; photo credit by Liam Davenport (2009)

Comments

Afric McGlinchey said…

An exciting new poet. Dying to get my hands on his collection. Saw Jennifer Matthews' review of it.

Mon Oct 04, 10:49:00 am 2010

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...".

IRISH POETIC GENIUS KEVIN HIGGINS HAS DIED

Terrible sad news - the major Irish satirical poet of his generation, and a poet of comedic genius, and powerful authentic resonance, Kevin Higgins, has died yesterday in Ireland. Higgins, the author of many poetry books, most published by Galway-based Irish press Salmon, was known and admired world-wide, but nonetheless deserved even more recognition from the established great and the good - i.e. the prizes, medals, crowns, gongs and other titles thrown at many many lesser lights - except, he was so brilliantly biting, critical, and scathing of all that he spied as dishonest, unfair or wretched. Sweet-natured and hilarious in person, on paper, he was terrifyingly sharp-witted, and sparing of no prisoners. In a just world, he would be seen as the greatest of recent Irish poets, and even so, is recognised in anthologies and critical studies everywhere as the most acute, savagely clever, and startling of Irish political poets. The measure of his unexpected reach - a 'Heineken poe

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