THE SWIFT REPORT 2024 updated

I usually write a brief report on the year, from my perspective, at the end of each 12-month cycle - sometimes closer to Christmas, or after.

Of late, they've been relatively solemn, and the main message has been gratitude. I have been grateful for the medical care and treatment that has allowed my failing heart to recover somewhat, at least temporarily, and for the chance to live a few more years. I was hospitalised in the summer with Sepsis and was in for many days and it was terrifying, but made it through.

I have also been grateful for the love and support of my partner, the hard work and talent of my publishing team, my friends, and those authors and investors that have miraculously helped stave off collapse of BSPG.

So it is, this year, that message remains the same.

I wish to add a few more things, though - this past year has been very painful, sad, and filled with some brief good moments of shared memories. I spent several weeks with someone very closely related to me who is facing terminal cancer at a cottage by a lake in Quebec in the summer, and it brought back the best times of our youth - swimming, playing Scrabble, marshmallows by the campfire...

The Paris Olympics was on, and my mother loved the Games, and we watched many events together on TV.

Another highlight of the year was celebrating the 40th birthday of my cousin/friend Andrew, in a small village in Scotland, in the house that Beatrix Potter wrote Peter Rabbit. We also attended the beautiful Irish wedding of our friends Sally and Susan, in Ireland, which had one of the best wedding disco dances afterwards. Also, being able to spend Christmas with friends and family was especially poignant this year. A further highlight eas having my new collection of poems published.

One of the key losses of the year was the death of my "Uncle", Harold Wilson. Although actually the married husband of my father's cousin, Harry, when young, enchanted and informed my brother and I with countless hours of strategy gaming, and taught us history at the same time. Harry was a brilliant scientist and teacher, but he loved sports and games and history as well.

I have other things to say about 2024.

I will say, what we all know, it has been a very dark disappointing worrying year politically - violent, negative, indicating a return to a kind of voting we had thought left in the 1940s. So many have died or suffered.

Like all thinking and feeling beings, I search for a higher hope or meaning, to offset this evil that seems to encase or inform the way we behave. I find a word for the hope in the word God, which I also struggle with. Another word might be Love.

Perhaps the best word would be Mercy; it seems lacking now, as much as at any time. No quarter is given, no foe forgiven, peace rarely forged - the cruel satisfactions of revenge trumping empathy, kindness, or a sense of tempering the blow.

I wish you love and mercy in 2025. I may say more later, but for now, this has been the way of this year, at the deepest level of my being.

Be well.

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....

"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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