E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Eyewear is on Spring Break.  When we come back in April, prepare yourself for brilliant poety features on major US poets, some insightful reviews of recent poetry, and other stimulating stuff for the eyes and mind.  Enjoy the holidays.

Sprin g (written after reading Don Share's Union )   Okay, here goes - something new, which is always better than the old, unless the old is you, or me, and one zooms to Tut and his wrappings, which had their spring awakening only when the tomb was broken into which is a bit like a tuber, or bulb or whatever flowers really are being decrypted from the soil; and sometimes birth and flowering app ear creepy, sort of B-Movieish, but we don't mention that so much when dancing in the spring rain, with e.e.'s balloon man, who, nowadays, would be, bluntly, creepy too.  Very. I am forcing a thing here, a style, because my head has no voice, only desires to appear reasonable when being strip searched, or ordering decaf lattes.  I want, in all fairness, to get along, little doggy, with the days as they go from out of my skin and diaries, flying off somewhere like those blossoms that represent what's best about spring and then enguttered, filthy-pin...

FOR ST PATRICK'S DAY, EYEWEAR IS VERY GLAD TO REPRISE THIS BLOG POST ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 15 2011. Eyewear is delighted to feature Paul Muldoon .  Muldoon (pictured here as a young man) is, in my opinion, the most significant poet from Ireland and Britain born since 1950.  This is his 60th year.  His style - witty, linguistically complex, musical, allusive, and filled with puns - is the most rhythmically original since Lowell' s and Auden 's.  He is the funniest Irish writer of genius since Flann O'Brien ; and the most alert to language's depths since Heaney and Joyce . He has developed a way of patterning words and images by alluding to myth, legend, and also personal experience, employing a syntax that is playful and sometimes mesmeric.  He might be the most verbally seductive of poets since Swinburne .  His influence is apparent on a whole generation of poets, and the work of, say, Don Paterson , is unimaginable without the Muldoon template ...

Pope Francis , the first Latin American Pope, the first Jesuit Pope, the first Francis as Pope, was an inspired choice this evening.  At 76, he is unlikely to overstay his welcome.  As someone who has devoted decades to working with the poorest people of Argentina, he brings a message of humility, charity, and kindness.  He is, in person, mildly charismatic - gentle, intelligent, and capable.  He has started well.  For those against the 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, and its Church, however, even this miracle of sagacity - a choice made almost in heaven - is darkness in the light; some are already alluding to the Pope's past as linked to the Junta.  This is very nasty unproven stuff, a real smear campaign, and misses the point - the Church's move into the 21st century has started today, on the 13th of March, 2013, only 13 years late.  God bless Pope Francis.

Travis Elborough, Caleb Klaces , and David Shook at the Albion Beatnik, Walton St., Oxford. April 26, 2013. Doors at 7.30 PM, readings begin at 8.00 PM. Travis Elborough, "the hipster Bill Bryson," reads from and spins records related to his critically acclaimed new book, The London Bridge in America. Oxonian Caleb Klaces reads from his Melita Hume Prize-winning debut Bottled Air , from Eyewear Publishing. David Shook reads from and plays whimsical Mexican records related to his debut collection Our Obsidian Tongues , also from Eyewear Publishing. Host Jenny Lewis, Oxford Poet and Oxford University tutor, introduces readers .

Nick Houghton reviews Absence Has a Weight Of Its Own by Daniel Sluman Daniel Sluman’s debut collection brings an unsparing eye to bear on sickness, death and dissolution. The preface, ‘Absence has a weight of its own,’ sets the tone for the whole, that of a child who has experienced a sense of its own mortality, trying to fill the void created by this formative experience. The poet’s voice is intimate and relies on personal anecdote, conveying the early established sense of incompleteness and loss via a number of scenes, notably in ‘Summer at the Farm,’ where loss of innocence is dealt with, …or that afternoon we watched   Wendy’s blood wisp, bloom ringlets   on the white of her thighs…, and, ‘After the Wedding,’ where the narrator feels bathos after the headlong rush of romance and marriage, Back then, you were so London   with your ecstatic white teeth… …we find ourselves   stalled in the marriage bed; your maiden name ...

A REVIEW OF THE OPEN DOOR: 100 POEMS 100 YEARS OF POETRY MAGAZINE by Dominic Bury The Open Door , an anthology of one hundred poems, painstakingly cherry-picked from the one hundred year archive of the esteemed American magazine Poetry succeeds wholly on the premise on which it was conceived. In placing emphasis on the poem, and not seeking (as is common within the poetry coterie) to clump together poets into distinct historical groups, teams or even factions, with their associated influences, successors and champions, editors Don Share and Christian Wiman have produced something not only fresh, but critically important. Granted, many of the previous century's leading figures are in. Ezra Pound 's 'In a station of the metro' opens the anthology, Yeats 's 'The fishermen' ends, and the pages are filled by among others T.S.Elliot, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens , and William Carlos Williams . Yet the anthology does not feel like a homag...

Today was International Women's Day .  Many women inspire me - perhaps, most especially, my wife, Sara Egan .  However, my wee niece, Elizabeth Ann , is the most welcome and beloved new woman in the world, to me.

14/03 - 20:00 to late ROSE THEATRE, KINGSTON Brand new event : MOSAIC brings you the finest in music, art, comedy, poetry, dance and theatre... a mish mash melting pot of special performances drawn from far and wide! Poetry presented by EYEWEAR ~ at 20:30-21:00 JON STONE was born in Derby and currently lives in Whitechapel. His collection School of Forgery (Salt, 2012) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and also won him an Eric Gregory Award. He has also edited and published multiple small and large poetry anthologies through Sidekick Books, the press he co-runs, including the Birdbook series and the forthcoming Coin Opera 2, an anthology of computer game poetry. http:// www.poetryinternationalweb. net/pi/media/resized/cd/ jon_stone_220x500.jpg KIRSTEN IRVING is one half of the team behind cult hand-made magazine Fuselit and collaborative poetry press Sidekick Books. Her pamphlet, What To Do, was released in 2011 by Happenstance Press and her debut c...

Reading, Writing, Responding in Poetry Monday 25 March | 5pm – 8pm | £30 / £20 concessions | Poetry Library, Level 5, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 8XX Discovering new and diverse perspectives in your work. In this workshop J acob Sam-La Rose will lead you through practical writing activities using the Southbank Centre Poetry Library collection to explore ways of writing and responding to page poetry. You’ll be challenged to not only generate new work but also to refine your craft in this stimulating session. You’ll be asked to read outside your comfort zone and take creative risks. You’ll leave the workshop with a new perspective on how to write in response to the poetry and writers that inspire you. To book please visit: http://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/index.php?id=events&event=1173 or call 020 8692 0231 (ext 249)

I have been having terrible dreams of late; woke up last night at 5 am, and wrote this... it is a rougher draft (fourth this morning) but wanted to share it with you... Night Mares Each night I wake in sweat and fear to sense my own godhead cruelly near. The beasts and fates my chafing soul breeds in Lethe let out of stables foaming manticores no saddle brakes, no bridle slows. We run a gamut of gross nightish shows to bolt in darkness crying for any light. Our uncivil dreams prove the world mad if unmade or made by us. I lie down in peace and rise in fright to recognise my mind a bad lover to me in our bed, doubling terror in one coupling head of woe. No god would make worlds as lost or wanton as my dreams become: so close they are in feeling thought to being thrown out far away from home. new poem by Todd Swift; March 5, 2013.