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

Eyewear is thoroughly chuffed to feature the superb American poet Kathleen Ossip (pictured above) this rainy London Friday, by showcasing three new poems of hers.   Ossip is the author of The Cold War , which was named one of Publishers Weekly 's best books of 2011; The Search Engine , which was selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics , a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, the Washington Post, The Believer, Fence , and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School and online for The Poetry School in London. She was a co-founder of LIT (the journal of the graduate writing program at The New School), and she's the poetry editor of Women's Studies Quarterly . She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.   3 Poems from “The Great Man” ...

Mike Loveday reviews The Best American Poetry 2010 edited by Amy Gerstler “Anthology” – the word is derived from ancient Greek: flower-gathering ( anthos-logia ). Since 1988 David Lehman has carried armfuls of the very best flowers to readers each year, carefully nabbing them from American poetry fields like a passionate, wise, maverick botanist. The annual Best American Poetry anthology (BAP hereafter) is a now classic series, the format freshened each year with a new guest editor (Lehman remaining the constant, behind the scenes). Since John Ashbery in 1988, the roll call of editors reads as a who’s who of great American poets – here are five particular years selected to give you a sense of the variety of poets who have been involved: Louise Glück (’93), A.R. Ammons (’94), Richard Howard (‘95), Adrienne Rich (’96), James Tate (’97). And here’s a reviewer’s confession – Richard Howard is a poet whose name I didn’t know before. Howard has written eleven volumes of poems, is a ...

Oh dear, another one of those days - Remembrance Day 2011 will be another, as was January 1st, 2001, when all the numbers align.  At ten past ten this morning it would have been even cooler.  What are these days called? Why are they not floating festivals, or moments for mass carnivals to erupt, where all order is inverted, and mayhem rules?  As luck would have it, I will be guest blogger over at The Best American Poetry blog this week, starting today.  So don't expect to see so much of me over here, until next Sunday. Pip pip.

Eyewear is very pleased, and more than a little delighted, to feature a new poem this Friday by David Lehman  ( pictured on the right with Charles Simic),  one of America's major figures in the poetry world - as third wave New York School poet, anthologist, teacher, scholar, critic, and impresario. David Lehman was born in New York City in 1948. He graduated from Columbia University and attended Cambridge University in England as a Kellett Fellow. He also received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. He is the author of several collections of poems, including  When a Woman Loves a Man  (Scribner, 2005),  Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man  (with James Cummins, Soft Skull Press, 2005),  The Evening Sun  (2002), The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000),  Valentine Place  (1996),  Operation Memory  (1990), and  An Alternative to Speech  (1986). His books of criticism include  The Last Avant-Ga...

I will be a guest blogger at The Best American Poetry blog this week (April 25-May1), and my first post is a broad overview of the state of contemporary poetry in Britain today.  I'll be featuring a few of the best new younger poets at the important and cool American site this week.