E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG

Margaritas for breakfast, ordered by the pitcher load to dull the mild hangover that was chipping away at my grey matter. “It’s a Marathon Monday tradition”, I was told, as I slugged it down with one beefy firewood fajita and the Everest pileof sweet potato fries. The window seats in Cactus Club, on the corner of Boylston Street, were rammed, so we perched on our toes to cheer as the first wheel chairs bolted around the corner and hit the 25.2 mile mark, pulling themselves through that last agonising leg. My head reeled with it. It was more than impressive.
There was an electric hum running the route, twisting every face up into that big American grin as the sun beat down from a completely clear sky. It was the perfect day for the Boston Marathon. We headed outside to watch the first women round the corner, soon to be peppered with the first male champions and weighed-down walkers for the Wounded Warrior Project.
Our plan was to bar hop to the finish line but we only made it half a bloc…

KINGSTON UNIVERSITY PRESENTS PENRHYN ROAD CAMPUS KINGSTON-UPON-THAMES
OPEN TO ALL - ADMISSION FREE
Tuesday 7th May, 2013, 5.30-7pm
An Evening of EcoPoetry and Sustainability: Conversations with Ann Fisher-Wirth, Todd Swift, Brycchan Carey and Katherine Eames Ann Fisher-Wirth, poet from the University of Mississippi, reading from her anthology of American EcoPoetry and in discussion with Todd Swift, Katherine Eames, and Brycchan Carey about US and UK ecopoetry and the making of anthologies. 
JG4006, Penrhyn Road, Kingston University. Refreshments will be served.

The Eyewear Spring Launch tomorrow, WEDNESDAY APRIL 24, 2013, in Bloomsbury, is proving to be one of the biggest and most exciting poetry launches of the year so far, in London...

We sold out at over 170 tickets, and have now moved the venue to the largest room at Goodenough College, THE GREAT HALL, which can fit 200.  So we have a few more places, if you had wanted to come, after all...

LAUNCHING ARE: CALEB KLACES, GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE, HANS VAN DE WAARSENBURG, AND DAVID SHOOK.

GUEST READERS WENDY COPE AND TIM DOOLEY.

FREE ADMISSION, FREE WINE.


http://eyewearspringparty.eventbrite.com/

David Lehman TALK:
‘A Fine Romance:Jewish Songwriters, American Songs’
Classic American songwriters and lyricists from the Gershwin Brothers and Leonard Bernstein to Oscar Hammerstein  David Lehman, the son of Holocaust refugees, was educated at Columbia University, where he received his PhD. He spent two years as a Kellett Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and worked as Lionel Trilling’s research assistant upon his return to New York City. He is the author of eight books of poetry, includingYeshiva Boys(2009), When a Woman Loves a Man(2005),The Daily Mirror(2000), andValentine Place(1996), all from Scribner. A volume of hisNew and Selected Poemsis forthcoming. He is the editor ofThe Oxford Book of American Poetry(Oxford, 2006) andGreat American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present(Scribner, 2003), among other collections.A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs(Nextbook / Schocken), the most recent of  his six nonfiction books, won the Deems Taylor Award from the American So…

Sleeping With Howard Roark

Only so often before that long chisel
in his thigh became more obstacle
than fertile marker; only so many times
I could spread as wide as a compass
to be ruled by the international style.
Roark never smiled during sex.
He'd just throw me right down
onto the appropriate organic materials
for the occasion, and I'd fit into the form
he most desired. I'd unfold, his blueprint.

Once I'd seen him dive into that quarry,
when just a girl without shape. An orphan,
I knew only molten ore. I craved pistons
and city walls erecting a new future,
and his arc that day down into clarity
struck me as it did that sheet surface
as a sign that though there was no God
there was a good in any body whose will
threw them from a height to tame water,
so that they would break it rising for air.

A body to hammer out design, to make
things to thrust high above the masses;
as when he'd say all his cooling love
was in the stress point where we both came,
penetration a golden …

Eyewear's title, Our Obsidian Tongues, by David Shook, has American launches starting here: 7 May 2013 - Skylight Books, Los Angeles Presented by Phoneme Media and PEN Center USA, David Shook reads from his debut collection Our Obsidian Tongues and from his translation of Mario Bellatin's Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction. Mario Bellatin will read from the Spanish-language original, and the pair will screen a collaborative short film. Free drinks. 7.30 PM

11 May 2013 - Neutra VDL, Los Angeles David Shook presents his debut collection Our Obsidian Tongues at the iconic Neutra VDL, personal residence of mid-century architect Richard Neutra. Introduced by novelist Geoff Nicholson and featuring special guests TBA. Champagne. 7.30 PM

Eyewear is very pleased, this rather grey April Saturday in London, to offer readers a chance to get to know one of the best of a new generation of American poets, with a selection of seven recent poems.

James Grinwis (pictured) is the author of The City from Nome and Exhibit of Forking Paths, which was selected by Eleni Sikelianos for the major National Poetry Series (America) in 2010 and published by Coffee House Press in 2011. He co-founded Bateau, a letterpress journal and chapbook press, in 2007, and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. His work appears regularly in US journals and reviews, and has appeared in the UK in 20 x 20.

OMD was always one of my favourite '80s bands - their machine-tooled fusion of sweet pop, and austere synths, made them different from Depeche Mode, who were darker, less elegant, less literary.  OMD seemed to refer back to an earlier 20th century Golden Age that Auden might have recognised - modernity in solemn collision with war, technology, love, and loss.  Famously, their best songs were about factories, Hiroshima, and dead female saints; and soundtracked Hughes movies.  But they were very English for all their international style.

Now comes their first truly great work for 30 years - English Electric - an album peppered with unrequired samples from robot voices and modish public announcements - that nonetheless has the sound, scope and mood of their masterpiece, Architecture and Morality.

The best track is the second, 'Metroland', a peppy yet sad reflection on "elegance in decline".  OMD always located lyricism in some austere ironic modernist hinterland of re…