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. ...

Sad news.   Andrew Sarris , one of the greatest of all film critics, has died.  Sarris was a huge influence on me as a writer of criticism, and a poet, since I have always been very aware of, and influenced, by film and film theory.  Sarris, of course, developed the auteur theory from his reading of Cahiers du Cinema , and elevated Hitchcock and other so-called film noir, B movie and entertainment directors into artists.  Without Sarris, it would have been hard to fully appreciate films like Touch of Evil or Psycho .  He gave us so much.

Sad news.   Frank Kermode , one of the greatest of English-language literary critics, has died, aged 90.  Kermode, along with A. Alvarez, William Empson, Leavis, Ricks , and a handful of others, managed to make 20th century British criticism - while more elegant and fathomable than its continental counterparts - as interesting, engaged, and vibrant as any body of such work anywhere.  Kermode's writing was brilliant, to be sure, and inspiring, and I found many of his books and essays a significant part of my growing-up process as a writer, poet, reader, and critic.  Especially major, to my mind, was his book The Sense of an Ending .  Also important, for me, and others, of course, were The Romantic Image , Wallace Stevens (the first serious English approach to this American master), and his History and Value, based on the Clarendon lectures.  His more recent work include d last years revisionary take on EM Forster .  English letters has lost one of it...

Jacket has created a page reprinting the dialogue that Jeffrey Side and I had at Eyewear about his thoughts on Heaney. I think such dialogues throw a positive light on the generative power of blogs, to instigate new platforms for criticism and critical engagement - and indeed revaluation - of poets, poems and poetic texts.

Oddly, The Guardian has just today run the obituary of the poet and critic Derek Stanford . Sadly, he died 19 December, 2008. Stanford should be appreciated - among other things - for writing on The Ninties Poets with sympathy, and for his early (1954) study of Dylan Thomas . He is not - I don't think - a major Forties poet, but he was a part of the period, and deserves to be recalled.

Andrew Duncan's Origins of the Underground : I've been reading it on the train from Manchester to London today. The book is must-have for anyone interested in British poetry from the 30s to the present, and counting. It's as if Lester Bangs , or Greil Marcus , those great rock and roll / punk critics, had been turned loose to consider, in freewheeling yet always informed, and brilliant fashion, poets like Terence Tiller , F.T. Prince , George Barker , and Lynette Roberts - yup, that's right, it's a completely personal, eccentric, yet researched foray into my favourite British period - the Forties. This isn't a review or a full-blown commentary on the book - wait for my book on the 40s for that - but an appreciation of a book that's never less than controversial, impassioned, and often deeply useful, even when annoying. One of the things that Duncan really achieves is to push along the tired us/ them, avant-garde/ mainstream thing - and observe that the re...

Poetry magazine is one of the oldest, most respected, and significant magazines devoted to poetry in the world. The September 2008 issue has a few lively letters, by and about Canadian poets, that are worth reading in full. In the UK, there tends to be radio silence when it comes to much North American poetry, so it is good to see the Canadian-US border opening to more convivial mutual dialogue. Evan Jones , a good younger Canadian poet studying for a PhD in Manchester, writes to defend Al Purdy , the quintessential free-verse rowdyman of Canadian poetry, from his detractor(s). And, Nicholas Bradley describes Carmine Starnino , one of Canada's leading younger poet-critics, as Canada's literary enfant terrible . Eyewear would like to weigh in on these controversies in the following way: a) Al Purdy is over-rated in Canada, but under-rated elsewhere, and it is likely he is as important for North American poetry of the 20th century as a Robert Creeley ; b) Carmine Starnino is...

Poetry always lays claim to a Golden Age just behind the corner. Perhaps poetry was always, more or less, unpopular - mainly of interest to a few. It seems that, in 1947 , according to Time , the problems for poetry were not that far removed from in the schools today. Nor was contemporary poetry more appreciated in the 1950s. According to John Press in The Chequer'd Shade (London: OUP, 1958), Stephen Spender stormed out (in protest) of a poetry reading being held at a Foyle's literary luncheon when Lord Samuel took the occasion to attack "the vice of obscurity" ruining British poetry, and read out, with evident distaste, a poem by Dylan Thomas , starting "A grief ago..." - such distaste still evident today among many English poet-critics. A new acclaimed book by fellow-Montrealer and music critic, Carl Wilson , on the music of Celine Dion , has taken the subject of distaste in a fun and fascinating direction - he loathed her work, and sets out to compreh...

This is my 840th post at Eyewear (give or take, some have gone by the wayside). I confess to being agnostic about blogs - the fact I have one should not be considered a ringing endorsement. I blog, therefore I am in the blogosphere, but where that gets me, or you, or anyone, is another matter. I think that this uncertain (or to be more stylish - say problematic) genre which is a blog leads to errors in reader response - though, how can any reader ever be really wrong about their own reaction? It is my experience that the Internet is not a cool medium. Or do I have that inverted? What I mean is, it evokes strong, near-instant responses. Blogs are emotive. They employ and discharge feeling - in that sense, they are like elements within poetry. But blogs also use (usually) prose, and are informative, and discursive - hence, the rational patina of much blog writing. Still, the writing may appear calm and cool and collected, but the impression, of a reader, upon finding their name, or book...

Eyewear is pleased to report that the Internet and Blogosphere continue to bear much interactive fruit. Dr. Ronan McDonald has kindly and thoughtfully replied to an earlier post, questioning his stance, in The Death of the Critic - available on Monday, 8 October. I for one am eager to read it. Here is his reply, sent to me earlier this evening by email: "Dear Todd, Thanks very much for your attention to my article. I've had a look at your blog entry and I would say we're much less in disagreement than it might appear. My book The Death of the Critic is not hostile to the blogosphere (though the line you quote from the article on blogging might give that impression). Can I blame the by-line on the article and the exigencies of space? One obvious advantage the internet has over the newspaper is space. I know there are excellent critics working on the internet and I hope that they get the recognition they deserve. I feel that blogs have unleashed a wave of energy through ...