THE EYEWEAR 20/200 MAJOR PATRON SCHEME 2015 - BE A PART OF LITERARY HISTORY

Eyewear Publishing has a major patron for 2015, who will be giving us £2,400 pounds over the year in monthly payments of £200. For that he is recognised for his generosity in each 2015 title, which he also receives free. We seek 19 more such patrons, to form the Eyewear 20/200 team. For some of you this will appear like a small fortune, but for many of you with professional careers, this could be a way of becoming actively part of a major new poetry and literary bridge between America and the UK (and beyond). Please do share this with those you think might be interested.

Our first brave and brilliant patron is Jonathan Wonham - and we are very grateful to his support. We aim to publish 15 books this year, of poetry, prose, and criticism, from emerging and well-known writers, from Australia, Holland, Mexico, Greece, the US, and many other places. No other UK small press is any more international than we are, and few can claim to now be publishing better or more intriguing poets. Based in West-end London, Eyewear is one of the best and best-designed and distributed small indie presses in Great Britain in 2015 - and occupies the same sort of transitional, trans-Atlantic, transformative role as the work of Ezra Pound did 100 years ago in London.

A potential 20/200 patron?

Our forthcoming poets and authors include Jacquelyn Pope, Sean Singer, Jan Owen, David Musgrave, Benno Barnard, Fady Joudah, Andrew Shields, Ruth Stacey, AK Blakemore, Elizabeth Stefanidi, Mario Bellatin, David Shook and more!

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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...".

IRISH POETIC GENIUS KEVIN HIGGINS HAS DIED

Terrible sad news - the major Irish satirical poet of his generation, and a poet of comedic genius, and powerful authentic resonance, Kevin Higgins, has died yesterday in Ireland. Higgins, the author of many poetry books, most published by Galway-based Irish press Salmon, was known and admired world-wide, but nonetheless deserved even more recognition from the established great and the good - i.e. the prizes, medals, crowns, gongs and other titles thrown at many many lesser lights - except, he was so brilliantly biting, critical, and scathing of all that he spied as dishonest, unfair or wretched. Sweet-natured and hilarious in person, on paper, he was terrifyingly sharp-witted, and sparing of no prisoners. In a just world, he would be seen as the greatest of recent Irish poets, and even so, is recognised in anthologies and critical studies everywhere as the most acute, savagely clever, and startling of Irish political poets. The measure of his unexpected reach - a 'Heineken poe

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

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