Poetry Focus On: Tiffany Anne Tondut

Eyewear is very glad to feature a poem by Tiffany Anne Tondut - pictured - this blustery London Sunday. Tondut is a confessional poet, performance poetry tutor at The City Lit and columnist for The Chap magazine. Born in 1981 and raised in Cambridge, she undertook her Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Theatre Studies at The University of Essex, from which she graduated with First Class Honours in 2005. Her first play Plagued was performed at The Lakeside Theatre. Over the next three years she developed her playwriting with The Soho Theatre before returning to poetry. In 2008 she won a publication in Poetry News followed by appearances in magazines including Nutshell and Rising. She has a CW Poetry MA from Kingston University.

Her work has been published in a number of anthologies including Split Screen, Penning Perfumes, E17 Poetry Trail and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam. In August 2012, her debut chap book The God of Love is Stained was publishedby Silkworms Ink, available to read online. She is currently working on her first full length collection. One of London's most original and compelling new poetry voices, Tondut is a fearless celebrant of the powers and perils of love, and poetry, and seems likely to continue to say and write what others only dream of, and many fear to utter, in a style her own, but toughly, wittily, poignantly derived from film noir, Americana, pulp, and desire in all its forms.

Follow her @tiffanyannepoet or read her newly re-launched blog, Poetry, and other dangerous things.

sex is a bitch from heaven (after charles bukowski’s ‘love is a dog from hell’)

w/ hands of nails

cigarette nipples

teeth that bite

thru solid pink babies

eyes like canons

my hunter green eyes

i prefer champagne

drink revolver red wine

shipwrecks

death cars

& duende excite me

it’s not you i’m interested in

i’d sooner have school boys

w/ hazelnut hair

in straw yellow boaters

eyes like canons

my hunter green eyes

my bin is blooming

w/durex (extra safe)

supposedly

numbing sensitivity

i pull two of them out

the walls of my bedroom are venus white

alex is gun smoke

ollie is pale swan

(but henry stayed in brighton)

i’ve got windows

the colour of outer space

hunter green eyes

venus bedroom

dull virtuous moon

there’s no ticking inside me

just a bomb

i sense something swimming up

inside a canal:

memories of shipwrecks

my grandfather had american teeth

my father has gold teeth

and one drunk night near the death

of his married life

he crawled into my room crying:

forgive me

you won’t see me again

like this

and henry might yet still come

pale swan is coming tomorrow

but gun smoke is coming any minute now

so i pour myself a glass

of revolver red wine

and wait

in my venus bedroom.

poem by Tiffany A. Tondut; reprinted online with the author's permission

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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