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

The highly-influential and important poetry critic, editor, anthologist, scholar, writer and poet, Alfred Alvarez (Al to friends), has just died. He was very welcoming to me when I moved to London, and we met often for a time in Hampstead and elsewhere. I arranged for him to do readings and talks for the Oxfam series, and at Kingston university. Al was a funny, gracious, helpful guy, and a great talker - a real mensch, and a one-off character with a touch of genius and more than enough brilliance and bravery. He mentored my collection - the most personal and distressing of my life - about my breakdown and despair on receiving the news I was infertile - his advice was strict and invaluable. I already miss him. Here was a guy who had been friends with Sylvia Plath, Zero Mostel, and John LeCarre, who still had time for the lesser-known, the smaller fry. That was because he was a maverick, outsider, and shit-disturber - he was frank and daring, and had great taste, but also heart. ...

COULD THIS BE POET X? Poet X is an Instagram poet, and they have over 5.4 million followers. However, flying in the face of the recent "snowfake" world of self-display, Poet X never shows their own face. We do not know their gender, race, age, nationality, or marital status, indeed, all we do know about them, for sure, is that they write brief poems in English, and that they post them to Instagram - the font is usually ornate, and the backgrounds are either blood-red, or goth-black, or full-moon white. Poet X recently published their first book with Rand House in the US, and they were on all the usual best-seller lists from the get-go; indeed, lines of eager humans snaked around corners before dawn, when the bookshops opened early, so huge was the incredible if bleary-eyed poetic demand. Poetry is back, big time! People are speaking of Beatlemania, or Pottermania, or Quadrophenia, to explain the phenomenon. We asked Poet X some questions for our special April 1 featur...

Possibility Glimpsed Through Windows: A Review of Ben Mazer’s Selected Poems Ben Mazer.  Selected Poems . (Ashville, NC: MadHat Press, 2017). 248 pp., with a preface by Philip Nikolayev.   A project that has been incubating since his debut collection White Cities (Barbara Matteau Editions, 1995), Ben Mazer’s Selected Poems (MadHat Press, 2017) has arrived. Spanning over twenty years of zealous creative output, this volume begins with three euphonious glimpses of Mazer’s poetic career. To read these early poems is to peer through the ornate window of some far-flung edifice to discover scenery and situations ripe with the allure of intrigue and espionage, as in the poem “The Traveller”:                           In a strange country, there is only one                ...

With the death of the poetic genius John Ashbery , whose poems, translations, and criticism made him, to my mind, the most influential American poet since TS Eliot , 21st century poetry is moving into less certain territory. Over the past few years, we have lost most of the truly great of our era: Edwin Morgan, Gunn, Hill, Heaney and Walcott , to name just five.  There are many more, of course. This is news too sad and deep to fathom this week.  I will write more perhaps later.  I had a letter from Ashbery on my wall, and it inspired me daily.  He gave me advice for my PhD. He said kind things about a poetry book of mine. He was a force for good serious play in poetry, and his appeal great. So many people I know and admire are at a loss this week because of his death. It is no consolation at present to think of the many thousands of living poets, just right now. But impressively, and even oddly, poetry itself seems to keep flowing.

Bridget Sprouls! Our 5th Fortnight winner!   Sprouls' poems have appeared in  Field, Map Literary, The New Yorker, The Stinging Fly,  and elsewhere. She lives in New Jersey, USA.   Her winning poem 'Chatter' - she gets £280 as this was a double-fortnight contest - appears below.   The runners up are:   Meg Eden , for her poem 'spirit house'   and   Anders Howerton , for 'An Original Series'   In general, this was a very strong field of poets, and poems - over 350 - one of the strengths of this particular prize is that we receive submissions from across North America, but also the UK, Ireland and beyond.   Howerton's modern sonnet was contemporary, quirky and compelling in its digital age syntax - an original lyricism emerges here.   Eden is clearly a fine poet - her poem - long and discursive, filled with rich questions and surprising imagery, was both clever and pro...