POETRY FOCUS: LISA MARIE BASILE

Smoking is bad for you; poetry is good for you. Balances out?

Eyewear is very pleased, thrilled, even, to share with you a few poems by an American poet who we adore, and not just because she wears the coolest glasses ever. She is one of the most provocative and promising of poets we've come across lately.

Lisa Marie Basile (pictured) comes from the bloodline of Giambattista Basile, the Italian fairy-tale writer. She is a graduate of The New School’s MFA program for creative writing in NYC. The author of Andalucia (The Poetry Society of New York) and Triste (Dancing Girl Press), her newest chapbook, war/lock, is out from Hyacinth Girl Press in 2014. Recently, Noctuary Press, run from University of Buffalo, accepted her full-length poetry collection, APOCRYPHAL.

Her work can be seen in PANK, kill author, Johns Hopkin’s The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, decomP, Saudade Review, La Fovea, Prick of the Spindle, elimae & Pear Noir! among many other publications. She is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine, a women’s culture, lifestyle and art website. She also edits Patasola Press, a micropress that focuses on emerging, established and female writers. She is an assistant editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice.

if the memory went my way

the child me [the me that is not me]

would be stuffed inside a woman-wife

as she carries two bouquets:

one from my father and one from me.

i am inside my mother.

the me that is not me. the future me

born of the kind of love

that sneaks up on you.

we bring flowers to those who lose something,

but what if we preempted their loss--

would it make the heart hurt less?

could i comfort her before my birth,

a sort of starstuff that sacrifices

its own existence

to spare a woman some pain?

if only she knew how to avoid it:

the aisle draped in calla lillies & mache lantern

in chantilly lace and audacious hemline.

her waist is a meadow, but she hid it;

the small sacred burst of pain

red wine flowing free between two summer legs

on a sepia summer day.

we will love eachother endlessly

even if i have inherited her weaknesses.

father

this is my muted apricot & green mythology

the hum of power lines

children with tincan secrets

a girl naked, hilltopped, with snowwhite tits

touching boys

stolen Treasurer cigarettes

& high red underwear.

me. Lolita me. me with bubblegum

& magenta. i’m on the white pony

& he is so much bigger than what he really is:

fat unbuttoned shirt

bald-headed silver specked,

a perfect god.

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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