Look Who Is Having a Christmas Party!

Eyewear Christmas Poetry Launch Party: Elspeth Smith and Simon Jarvis plus special guest Caleb Klaces

Eyewear is celebrating its first year as an indie poetry publisher on the 5^th December with warmth, cheer and merriment at the Oxfam bookshop, Marylebone. For a Christmas treat, Eyewear are launching two brilliant new collections for its fourth and fifth titles.

Dangerous Cakes is Elspeth Smith’s remarkable debut; a quirky, dark and kitsch collection of poems. Smith’s sly poems limit themselves with obsessive tropes – shoes, wine glasses, balloons, tea, cake, dancing – and then open them up, somehow, into vast, mysterious places, with a question or apercu. She is a fascinating woman, born in Ceylon in 1928 to British parents, spending her childhood on a tea plantation.

Eighteen Poems is by one of the UK's most respected avant-garde poet-critics, Simon Jarvis. His writing intriguingly reaches out to the Wordsworthian tradition, being a mixture of the lyrical, romantic and post-modern. Jarvis is the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Cambridge.

You will have the opportunity to hear both poets read from their work, as well as our special guest Caleb Klaces, who won the Melita Hume Poetry Prize this year with his strong and original collection Bottled Air. This is being published by Eyewear in spring 2013.

Please rock up at no charge to the Oxfam bookshop, 91 Marylebone High street, 7-9pm, for a glass of white or red, some ground-breaking poetry and most importantly, some Christmas joy.

About Eyewear:

Eyewear Publishing Ltd. is based in London, England. It was founded in the Diamond Jubilee/Olympic year of 2012. Emphasis is on excellent new work, as well as the rediscovery of out-of-print figures.

Contact: info@eyewearpublishing.com

Twitter: @EyewearPoetry

FB: www.facebook.com/EyewearPublishing

www.eyewearpublishing.com

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....

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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