New Poem by Michael Egan

Eyewear is pleased to feature a new poem by Michael Egan today. Egan is from Liverpool. A pamphlet, The River Swam, was published in 2005 by Paula Brown Publishing and a second, Folklores, in 2010 by The Knives Forks and Spoons Press. His first full length collection Steak & Stations was published by Penned in the Margins in December 2010. Two further pamphlets are due out in early 2011 (I Went to the Ship, Erbacce; After Stikklestad, The Knives Forks and Spoons Press). He is currently working on an anthology of poetry in his Motivist form and a second full collection, Monsieur Dassonville and His Duck.

He Never Got To Caen

Pratt was his Norman name and Ramavath his wished for Indian grandmother’s.

His true name he kept hidden in hollows beside rivers or down the crevices of pub couches.

When he was done with raking dunes so they sloped at the right angles down to the Irish Sea

he’d cross flat sprout sprouting fields to Burscough and his corrugated hut, his flotsam bed.

I met him on an old road near Snape Green when I’d been walking since winter

so my feet were as black as the brogues I’d set off in and as hard as tanned leather.

“I never even got to Caen,” he said, draining his mild, pulled out a bitten through rag

and mumbled “my father gave me this pennant, this peace munching dove.”

Repeated it three times like Tolstoy's hermits, but drunk we didn’t feel the high summer heat

anneal our necks and the midges like awls piercing our skin; melted metal, bored out wood.

“I was an ancient son of Scarisbrick,” he said when we reached his hut by a bend in the Alt,

“last of a lost lot, I promised to take this rag to Caen where others like it might flutter still.”

As summer ending rain titter-tattered on his shack’s roof he sucked on the cloth

like he was sucking out the memories of his walking, the flavours of his guilt.

“I slept on a bench in Portsmouth, woke on a ferry to Cherbourg, naked and bruised,

spent that winter raising marquees searching for Mont St Michel but only found giants

living beneath the stones of Carnac, ran from them along a spit of land

then, naked still, let my body fall into Biscay’s Bay and was found by a fisherwoman

near Suazon before she tossed me back, more bruised, with the day’s bad catch

so I was drowned and drowned again until I was pulled into Brest’s bosom

and taken for a myth, a man made from the depths of the sea’s tossing dreams,

given over to a writer who wintered in a villa on the Isle-de-Batz looking south to Roscoff

but all the words of my story had left me and I clung only to my cloth, now torn, now ruined,

so he let me take passage to Rosslare where I fell into a sleep and did not wake

until I’d wandered my way home and saw those ragged dunes, all piled upon and crumbling,

so wiped my brow with the last colours of my cloth, the faded heralding of my name,

and for months I raked the sand, forgot that name and with each reshaped dune

I thought of Caen, her cathedral and stone, her leftover Norman sons, their scalps

no longer harshly shaven, heads hanging in the lessening of memory, wavering, lost to time.”

poem by Michael Egan; published online with permission of the author

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....

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 ...

"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...".

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

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