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

It is perhaps no surprise that most ( not all, thankfully ) film critics have praised Tarantino's latest (9th) film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood... as a masterwork - I have seen it even called Shakespearean - a term that comes from a scene in the movie; but he is more a Jacobean Middleton. Tarantino's late career has been focused on revenge - one of the primary staples of drama and melodrama in all English literature; it is also, of course, the staple of Nicholas Cage's late career, so it is not an inherently perfect one. Violence is to Saint Quentin what bars are to San Quentin - the raison d'etre. I cannot think of another director - not even Peckinpah or de Palma, Hitchcock or Scorsese - so cocked and aimed in one direction - that of setting up and paying off scenes and situations so that 'all hell breaks loose' and terrible violence ensues. Tarantino has argued - often publicly and coarsely - for an art for art's sake separation between reel violen...

The thing about The Great Gatsby is, everything about it has been said, and exhausted.  Only solemn slight Tobey Maguire hadn't read the novel by the time it was being remade by Baz Luhrmann , which is so dumb it is almost okay.  I saw it last night in 3D, and I loved it.  Parts of it are as grand, silly, wild, and vivid as anything in American cinema, with the panache of Citizen Kane , the colour scheme of Dick Tracy .  Most film critics have been very tedious about this movie, because it does not do justice to their idea of the esteem in which the novel should be held.  The novel is the greatest prose poem in the American canon, and Fitzgerald was a Keats who lived too long - ruined by critical indifference and his own dipsomania and vulnerability.  I love him too.  You don't make poems into movies, and if you want to, you have to adapt them to the screen.  This movie is an adaptation, and more to the point, an interpretation, of a mind set, ...

Today is a day to be thankful.  I have two poems in the February 2011 issue of Poetry , which arrived a few minutes ago in the post (delayed by a thunderous downpour earlier).  I am one of the asterisked poets (there are other fine poets included as well of course) - my first time in this, the greatest, and most significant of all poetry magazines in the English language.  I count this as one of the highlights of my life so far - not better than my wedding, or first real kiss, but on a par with graduation, my first book, that sort of thing. So - huge.  And why?  Because I remember, as if it was yesterday, the first time I heard of Poetry , when reading about Ezra Pound , when I was 14 - he became my hero.  I recall reading Poetry in university, in the library at Sir George Williams.  The slim, tidy magazine has been a part of my life, and what it means to be a poet, for 30 years.  Did I ever think I'd appear in its pages?  Not on your life...

I have just completed Philip Roth 's 2010 novel, Nemesis , which seems to me to be a classic of simple diction and classical story-telling, like Hemingway 's Old Man and the Sea - and Roth too deserves the Nobel for this book, which is about as humane, moving, suspenseful, and powerful as literature can get - concerned as it is with mind, body, and soul - ultimately how these inter-act with history, love, and duty - over which hangs death and disease.  Biblical, yet homely and local (Newark), timeless and yet set in a time fraught for Jews and all Americans (1944), focused on a few young Jewish people of decency, and yet widening to embrace all those struck by "bad luck", and those blessed with good fortune, Nemesis amazed me with its efficacy. It is the first novel of this century, in English, that truly made me want to write my own novel.  However, what is doubly impressive is that Roth has pulled off a neat trick - while seemingly straightforward, this is a fic...