Poetry Focus On: OLIVER DIXON

Oliver Dixon is a poet and writer based in London whose poems and reviews have appeared in PN Review, London Magazine, The Wolf, Frogmore Papers, Long Poem Magazine, Blackbox Manifold and Gists and Piths. His debut volume is forthcoming February 2013 from Penned in the Margins. He blogs at Ictus.

Cartoon Man

One moment sun, same ochre as the leaves

it’s steeped through, gracing my meander home

from work – the next : this odd attempt at rain,

hardly rain at all but just this gentlest

sprinkling imaginable, sparkling down out of a blue

cloudless except for several oval clumps

like ideas occurring to a cartoon man:

am I him then, caught between two weathers,

clowning through this ticker-tape parade

of glimmers set up for someone worthier

to read a Sign in, some epiphanic

confirmation of faith – for him, perhaps,

the old asylum-seeker, fled from war

and displacement as I’ve fled driving-tests

and over-crowded tubes, but too busy today

spiking leaves one by one into his sack

even as others, other rusted hinges,

twirl unscrewed around him? Is there time,

in the end, or space in our memories

to pause and remember anything

so fugitive, uncatchable, each droplet

a tiny aperture onto a timelier moment,

a vivider world which is nonetheless

this one I have only to live in?

poem by Oliver Dixon; 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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