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....

"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...".

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 ...

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