Featured Poet: Christian Campbell

Eyewear is very glad to welcome poet Christian Campbell (pictured) this rather crisp London Friday. Campbell is a writer of Bahamian and Trinidadian heritage. A professor at the University of Toronto, he studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and received a PhD at Duke.

He is the author of Running the Dusk, which was a finalist for the Cave Canem Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the Best First Book in the UK and is the winner of the 2010 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Running the Dusk is his first book.

It is to be hoped that we can see a lot more of this fine poet over in the UK in the near future, hopefully reading for Oxfam, among other places. He exemplifies the best in truly international writing.

Oregon Elegy

for I. H.

I once told a friend, who was going

to Oregon for Christmas with his girlfriend,

he’d be the only black person there

and, in fact, if you shuffle Oregon,

like a seasoned minstrel, it spells Negro

but with an extra O as if to make

a groan, nearly a shout, perhaps

a moment of fright: O Negro in Oregon!

He died laughing and told me

that’s word-lynching, and I wondered

if we could also lynch words,

string them up, sever them,

tattoo them with bullets and knives;

if we could hold a barbecue

for language swaying with the branches,

soon picked to silence by crows—

words soaked in coal oil

then set ablaze, a carnival of words

sacrificed over rivers, from bridges,

from trees, too-ripe words dangling

from branches just beyond our reach.

Like Alonzo Tucker in 1906,

shot twice, then hanged

from the Fourth Street Bridge

by two hundred men arched into one

white arm because (we wonder,

we know) a white woman said

he raped her. I want to tell my boy

blacks weren’t wanted in Oregon

at first, but what do I know, I’ve never

set foot on Nez Perce land where

exactly one hundred years after

Tucker, he could go west to one edge

of America because he loves

his woman enough to be

the very last Negro on Earth.

poem by Christian Campbell; reprinted with permission of the author

photo credit: Toni McRae

A poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...

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....

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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