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

It is always sad news when a fiercely experimental, committed, and talented poet dies, and so it is that I was sad to learn that Sean Bonney has died, aged 50, in Berlin. Bonney and I often crossed pens online, in the past, and he was no friend to my ideas on poetics. But, he was a poet with conviction and brilliance, and every death is the death of a world. I wish sincere condolences to all who knew him, and loved him, and hope that his poems live on, in memory and print, discussion and study, for years ahead.

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. ...

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to tha...

Eyewear Man plotting to make billions It is true, Eyewear Publishing has adopted some elements of the "American model" that uses Submittable more than other small presses have done in the past in the UK - though Submittable is becoming increasingly respected, in the UK and the USA.   Competing with so many digital platforms now means we have to try our best in a very robust climate. The agents and poets who work with us, and other authors, are usually impressed and comforted to know they get three things with an Eyewear contract a) business nous; b) unimpeachable editorial and aesthetic intelligence and sensitivity; and c) a commitment based on genuine love of literature. Eyewear is about the opposite of money - it is about culture surviving, even thriving, despite financial pressures - and about working within the system to bring the best looking books possible, with the best writing in them, to the widest audience, across the world.   However, so l...

HE BROUGHT POST-WAR AMERICAN POETRY TO BRITAIN IN A VITAL WAY British poet of genius and cultural significance, Tom Raworth has died after a long and protracted illness, aged 78. Writer, artist, teacher, and publisher Tom Raworth was born in South London and attended the University of Essex. In 1970, he earned an MA in the theory and practice of literary translation. As founder of Matrix Press and co-founder of Goliard Press, Raworth was instrumental in bringing an entire tradition of American poetry to English readers. Promoting the work of a number of poets associated with the Black Mountain School, including Edward Dorn, Robert Creeley , and Charles Olson , Raworth also published the poetry of Elaine Feinstein, Aram Saroyan, Anselm Hollo , and Zoltan Farkas .   Raworth’s own work has also been identified with the Black Mountain School. He wrote over 40 collections of poetry, among them The Relation Ship (1969), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, Eternal Se...

PLATH IS THE MOTHER OF US ALL, IN SOME WAYS TODD SWIFT ON STRANGER, BABY BY EMILY BERRY (FABER, 2017) "ANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE, THE CONFLUENCE OF POETIC RESPONSES TO BEREAVEMENT" I hesitate to call this a review - it isn't - it's an appreciation, and a comment. I should say that I think  Stranger, Baby by Emily Berry   is one of the best books of British poetry you are likely to read in 2017; and that it seems to me to be at once better, and slightly less good, than its predecessor, Berry's feted debut, Dear Boy , whose title similarly played on various meanings. I once was Berry's "poetry tutor" - for several key years in the now-famed MAIDA VALE GROUP I ran through the POETRY SCHOOL - other members included Liz Berry , Helen Mort and Phil Brown . I recall seeing almost all the poems in Dear Boy in early stages. I have seen none from this new manuscript, though I predicted, even urged it to appear, in my several reviews/essays on Dea...

Jackself by Jacob Polley REVIEWED BY ROSANNA HILDYARD Jackself is a scarecrow made up of lean meat and fat, frost, daws, lanterns, digestive biscuits, roundabouts and cow parsley. Jackself is Polley’s alter ego in this series of narrative poems, which work equally well individually as they do patchworked into a collection. Jackself is a wild pagan figure, a wodwo from ancient England, Jackself follows a snotty teenager growing up around the crumbling farms of Lamanby, in Cumbria. Although Jackself is a hodgepodge of tones and references, it forms a remarkably coherent collection when read end to end. It is structured as a poetic bildungsroman , charting Jackself’s loss of innocence as he comes to terms with grief. Jackself is the love story of two friends: Jackself of Lamanby and Jeremy Wren, who bully and wrangle with each other, go fishing in Lamanby’s deserted tarns, and stay out at night to drink white cider and Malibu together ‘way out among the hedgerows’. ...

I once had the pleasure of having a poem I had written directed, and recorded by, the brilliant director-actor Fiona Shaw . Or rather, it was a treat but also a shocker. For Ms Shaw spent an hour trying to wrest a performance from my reading of my own work to get to the heart of the matter - a kernel of truth she sensed I could not quite hit with my voice, my vocal performance. Finally, in something akin to desperation, she admitted that actors, for her, were far better readers of poems than the poets themselves.  In fact, she confided, if actors did poetry readings more often, people might actually enjoy poetry. Such a viewpoint is partly behind today's event in British radio broadcasting - a New Year's Day special seeing Jeremy Irons (that immortal ham, best-beloved for Brideshead Revisited and Die Hard 4 or whatever ) - reading ALL OF TS ELIOT'S POETRY (!) over the course of the day, on BBC Radio 4 - directed by, you guessed it, Fiona Shaw. Meanwhile, it must be sai...

British poet Isabel Galleymore , pictured, won the anniversary competition for the best poem involving eyes, vision or eyewear in a poem...  Judging was tough.  The competition was in 2015!  Yikes. Anyway, below is her winning poem. She has won £110 (in honour of our tenth/eleventh anniversary years of 2015/16) and we need to pay her still!  Hopefully Eyewear will meet up with her this coming month and hand it over in cold hard cash... Isabel Galleymore's first pamphlet, Dazzle Ship , was published by Worple Press in 2014. Her work has featured widely in magazines and she won the London Magazine Poetry Competition in 2015. She has just completed a PhD at the University of Exeter and is currently the Charles Causley Poet-in-Residence. False-Eyed Frog The forest’s false-eyed frog turns at the sight of a snake or rat to reveal a Venetian mask on her arse and like these eyebrows that raise upon her trembling hips, a padded bra pegged...

SUBMIT UP UNTIL MIDNIGHT TONIGHT!: http://store.eyewearpublishing.com/pages/the-best-new-british-and-irish-poets As the saying goes: judging poetry is like judging a friendship, or flavours of ice cream, or whether you can make the jump from one low wall to another. Nobody knows how or why you’d want to do it, you have to try very hard to maintain objectivity and you’re likely to end up lying on your back with no friends, covered in ice cream. That said, judgement and being judged is fairly central to any creative endeavor. When I talk to students at open days I try to put their minds at ease about the whole marking process. How can you assign a numerical grade to a work of art? It’s no different, I argue, to the reality of professional (or semi-professional or committed amateur) writing. Whether by an editor, an agent, a producer, a critic, a reader standing in a bookshop deciding what to buy: your work is going to be judged. Deal with it. (It now strikes me that this probab...

TERENCE TILLER’S LOVELY SHAPES OF RHETORIC : AN INTRODUCTION TO HIS COLLECTED POEMS   Terence Tiller died in 1987, in December; 29 years later this autumn his Collected Poems is to appear, on his centenary. His poems, often explorations of love and desire, and often set in Egypt during World War II, are almost the poetic equivalent of the Bogart-Bergman film Casablanca . Tiller, who is more or less a forgotten figure now, published three volumes with the New Hogarth Library in the Forties. Poems was the first of these, from 1941; his second was The Inward Animal , from 1943. His Third, Unarm, Eros , from 1947, completes a trilogy of wartime poetry arguably unequalled for its extravagant lyric modernism. One of the few contemporary critics to write on Tiller is Andrew Duncan, who emphasizes the sensitivity and sensuousness of mid-century poetry, especially Tiller’s. Tiller ‘seems to have devoted much time to writing poetry which was sexy and romantic’. [1] Duncan al...