Featured Poet: Alex McRae

Eyewear is very glad to welcome British poet Alex McRae (pictured) this rainy London Friday. McRae was born in London; educated at Oxford; and now lives in Washington DC, where she works in the media. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2009.

Her poetry has been published in Poetry Review, Magma, the Manhattan Review, Penumbra, and Nth Position. I met her first when she was a student of mine in an advanced monthly poetry seminar I was running at The Poetry School, which has included the likes of Helen Mort, Joe Dunthorne, and Emily Berry. She more than held her own in the group and I was very glad to see her work recognised with the Gregory. I'm now looking forward to her debut collection. She has a wonderful eye for detail, a good sense of music, and a disconcerting way with an image.

Buffalo Billiards

I was apart in a green sea of tables,

players cocked at the hip over spotlit baize,

taking that last behind-the-shoulder glance

before committing to the shot.

You rolled in from nowhere, right on cue.

You bought us all a round, and said

“Welcome to my country”, resting your beer

on the satiny sill of wood. My sister

flashed her belly just above the pocket

while some guy tried to take his shot.

We leant over the empty pool table,

all our angles tilted towards each other:

neck through shoulder, elbow through wrist,

our slow collision set off by the lightest brush.

poem by Alex McRae; published online with permission of the author

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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