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

  POEM FOR MY MOTHER   I have not done justice to my mother, The sweep of her life, How when young, she was young, In a country, on a farm, and other children, And I will never know their names, I have forgotten to ask so much, How lazy have I been! Now that she is going, Out of this room, where we can see her, Where she can be talked with, now that she is Leaving the scene of all our disputations, All the tomfoolery of this world, and the music She listened to, her cooking, her reading, Her studies at McGill, those meticulously marked Textbooks, the kisses, the childbirth, the sons, Jordan, the colds, the flying to China, The mourning, lovemaking, waking to make instant Coffee, the long discussions about serial killers, About our ancestors, about Uncle Sandy and Port Daniel, the summers, the winters, the cross-country Skiing, the wedding photos, the modelling career, The rages, the laughing, sometimes, the criticism Of certain TV ...

Recently, a well-known literary journal in Canada, PRISM International , issued an apology for publishing a few poems by one Stephen Brown , after an editor of his was accused of insensitivity for supporting the ex-convict. It turns out, so said the apology, the magazine did not know, when they published his poetry, that he had been convicted of a vile murder years before; that he had done his time, and, released, started a new life, writing under a pseudonym, in Mexico. Once they had realised they had published a criminal, they apologised; and soon, the cancellers had Brown's poems removed from the national Parliamentary website set up to showcase Canadian poems. Stephen Brown was found guilty of having beaten a woman to death with another man - she was an Indigenous woman, Pamela George , and it was of course deeply painful to this decent community in Saskatchewan to know the killer was now free and apparently being feted by the great and good (the local university in Regi...

WITHOUT A ROOF Good god I'm gorgeous, open      on the operating table, so impeccably pink pearl you could drape me on a hotel heiress,      make a mint. It is a costly transformation: girl to goddess, curve to cosmic pin-up,     star-strong in my homemade aristocracy. The ring, I mean. The one he gave me days     before I lifted like some unfeeling winged thing on a plane that didn't crash.     What's worse I'm well, not huffy, hidden from the day, not having ended anyone,     unsympathetic in the most exquisite way. Nude, open on a billboard in the Amazon     as pythons crawl inside to please. He disapproves: the carefree sovereignty of solitude,     almost anorexic silhouette. They say it's tactless to be happy, living is an exercise     in letting go, existence as a river runs its course rega...

LOUIS DUDEK WAS COHEN'S EARLY MENTOR, AND MY FRIEND There was never a time when I did not know about Leonard Cohen .  I was born in 1966, and he had been famous (in Canada) as one of our best poets even before then; by 1967, he was world-famous, arguably Canada's most-beloved figure ever on the world stage, and he kept on being so, up until his death yesterday. My mother was a huge fan, and his music and poetry (less so his prose) was always in my childhood. Since I was born in Montreal (as was he), and shared his passion for debating and writing (less so, strumming guitars), he was never far from my thought - indeed, as a teenager trying to write poetry, and wondering if such a role was feasible for a Montrealer, Cohen showed the way (along with Irving Layton , and Louis Dudek , his mentors, later both mine as well). Mostly, like most Canadian poets, my affections were of the love-hate kind. He was the absentee father, who rarely did or said anything to promote younger ...

SOME ANTHOLOGIES WEAR THEIR POETICS OPENLY ON THEIR JACKETS Canada has so many poets it is hard to keep track, due to an impressive arts council funding regime that, at one point saw a census reveal 12,000 living poets with books out from small and larger presses. Much like in the UK or the US, but perhaps even more notably, every small town, every large city, every province, has a laureate poet. It is therefore impossible to anthologise them all - but when in 2010 Evan Jones and I put out an anthology of Modern Canadian Poets for Carcanet, the 40 or so poets we included were all out of print or unknown in the UK, except for about three. Today, in the UK, for instance, there are about five contemporary Canadian poets in print. Back in 2010, a young Toronto-based poet, with a large press behind him, with the wonderful name Jacob McArthur Mooney , attacked (there is no other word) this anthology, as if it had been the baseball bat that had clubbed his parents to death. He ...

It is National Poetry Day in the UK.  To celebrate, I want to offer readers a poem from the significant Canadian poet Robert Priest 's new collection, Previously Feared Darkness .  It is a collection I will be reviewing here before long.  For now, enjoy. Robert Priest, Previously Feared Poet V When Churchill flashed his famous V sign It wasn’t for victory As everyone says It was for vagina For he knew What I know That there is still not enough praise For the vagina He knew that if anything is miraculous The relation between the inside of the vagina And the outside of the penis Is Nixon knew it too Even as he resigned Even as he turned to face the music Of his own destiny He flashed that last V But my friends It was not a sign of peace It was Nixon’s way of saying That the inside of the vagina Is as numinous as it gets This secret is well known The vagina is a sign Without which not a single holy thing May be written...

Catherine Graham, one of Canada's finest poets Eyewear is very honoured to publish these four new poems by Catherine Graham , who I think is one of Canada's best poets born since 1960.  She made the selection for my Selected Poems , due out in 2014.  She has been writing during her recent treatment for cancer, and these poems represent her at her best. Her most recent collection will be published this fall, Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects from the excellent press Wolsak and Wynn; they make beautiful-looking books. MRI Slide in like a deli-cut of meat, be domed by a crazed traffic of hellish sounds; despite the lend of (useless) headphones, dense metal filings of noise worm their way in like tics to melt your mental brain pan. No centre of pain to repel the whipped sensation; just bombs of clangs with gears and charging cracks and… silence— till it gears again. to see cell...