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

The growing realisation that the key figures of our Online-Digital Age - Google, Amazon, and Apple - have made hundreds of billions of dollars in profit from us little people - and not bothered to pay more than a tiny fraction of that back in taxes to help our societies reminds all of us, I think, of the unsustainable nature of commercial greed, when unfettered.  Beyond all the talk of ethics, and regulation, lies the humanity of the issue - are we or are we not all in the same boat?  Apparently, according to top bankers and CEOs, not.  I do not know where these people live - in havens? - but if they enjoy the safety of the public roads, the security of the armed forces - then they should pay their income tax like everyone else.  As a small businessman trying to make ends meet, I am not in favour of very high taxation for companies at a time of a sagging economy - 20% or so seems about right to me - but surely, .05% or .005%, is criminally absurd.  In the meanti...

The Olympics looms - it has always felt central to the Eyewear story, because the blog began just as the Olympics was announced for here, way back in July 2005 , 7 years ago (yes, this is our 7th year!).  And there is every chance it will be a great Games, and Team GB will do very well, perhaps coming in fourth in the medal tables.  However, the news today is more grim than that gold lining implies - the UK is in serious recession.  The economy has shrunk 4% in the last few years, and, according to the BBC analysis, this is now the worst financial crisis the UK has faced, outside of the war years, in the last hundred years - that is, worse than the Great Depression, or the 70s.  So, as Eyewear faces forward, it does so chastened, and concerned.  Yes, poetry matters, and yes, it needs to be published.  But the perilous state of the nation is of grave concern also, and overhangs other considerations.  Let us try to enjoy the remarkable hot sun, and mov...

Diamond Bob We have recognized that banks need to become better citizens Now there's a man you'll hear about most anywhere you go. and that our ability to do this is critical His holdings are in Texas and his name is Diamond Joe. to generate long term value for shareholders. And he carries all his money in a diamond-studded jar. This is not philanthropy He never took much trouble with the process of the law. – it’s about using Barclays' unique skills and resources I hired out to Diamond Joe, boys, did offer him my hand. to deliver real commercial benefits He gave me a string of horses so old they could not stand. in a way that also creates sustainable value for society. And I nearly starved to death, boys, he did mistreat me so. We have made firm progress against our Citizenship agenda And I never saved a dollar in the pay of Diamond Joe. in 2011, delivering benefits to the real economy. Now his bread it was corn dodger and his meat...

As the whole world now knows, Greece is apparently going to have a referendum on whether it will accept an EU bail-out.  This indecision has led to jittery markets.  If Greece votes to default instead, they will leave the EU, the euro, and this tail-spin will likely destroy the currency, and pull the world into a full recession.  Italy and Portugal may then collapse, more or less.   Eyewear gives this doomsday scenario around a 50-50 chance of occurring.  Meanwhile, the anti-capitalists of London continue to challenge the do-nothing theology of the C of E, which seems gutless in the face of genuine protest.  However, such protest leads down the same dark road as Greece is currently on.  The collapse of the banking system would lead to chaos, suffering, and even perhaps war or violence, on a scale not seen since the 1940s; and what or who would step in?  China?  I continue to predict 2011 as a watershed year, and more is to come.

Europe is on the brink.  When a leader of Germany predicts that potential economic ruin could lead to future lack of peace in Europe, as Merkel did today, it is time to take notice.  Greece, then Italy, and Spain, may default soon, if nothing is done.  It seems an extraordinary failure of nerve and imagination, a bit like the period before World War One, or Two, when leaders dithered, afraid to act, thus ensuring worse was to come.  However, there is another danger, one of too-great union - should the EU become a two or three tier organisation, with some nations fiscally joined at the hip, they may all find it more easy to stumble over the cliff together.  In this way, some British caution makes sense; yet the more sidelined the Tories demand we remain, in the UK, the less control we will have over the deals ahead.  These deals will be trying.  Facing Europe is possible recession, or the meltdown of the Euro, or worse chaos.  One must hope for th...

Sam Riviere co-edits the anthology series Stop Sharpening Your Knives , and was a recipient of a 2009 Eric Gregory Award. Faber & Faber published his pamphlet in 2010 as part of their New Poets scheme. These poems are taken from  '81 Austerities', a series currently being published in instalments with supporting material at this place . CRISIS POEM In 3 years I have been 'awarded' £48,000 by various funding bodies councils and publishing houses for my contributions to the art and I would like to acknowledge the initiatives put in place by the government and the rigorous assessment criteria under which my work has thrived since 2008 I have written 20 or 21 poems developed a taste for sushi decent wine bought my acquaintances many beers many of whom have never worked a day in their lives how would you like to touch my palm and divine how long my working week has been mostly I watch films and stare and try to decide what ...

The other day, the world's biggest popular rock band, U2 , played the UK's greatest summer festival, Glastonbury; the event, historic for some, was marred - or improved - depending on your perspective - by a small group of protesters, who want U2 to pay taxes in Ireland, rather than avoid them.  The response, from the group's manager was that U2 was "a global business" and had an international tax profile.  Fine and dandy - but that admission, to me, signals the death of U2 as a band of singer-songwriters I want to have in my earphones.  When I listen to music I don't want to listen to BP or Exxon.  If U2 is now a global business they can't have my business, because I don't want to think of music that way.  Would we still love and respect Heaney or Ashbery if they were incorporated?   The Pogues are not a multinational corporation; they are geniuses.  What makes matters worse is that Bono swans around with world leaders, claiming to want to improv...

The news that British PM David Cameron has fought in Brussels to severely limit Britain's financial exposure to EU funding for the Greek bailout is not good.  It is evidence of an historic betrayal.  Since at least the time of Byron , Britain has understood the importance of Greece, as classical ideal, and as reality.  Millions of British people travel to Greece every year, for holidays in the sun, welcomed by great hospitality, food, natural beauty, and ancient history of extraordinary worth.  Modern Greece is not Athens in its golden age.  But we owe the idea of Greece a debt worth far more than billions.  We owe them our civilisation.  It therefore seems sad and petty and ignoble to refuse to come to their rescue, when they need us most.

Tonight the great and the good of British Poetry will read, hosted by Carol Ann Duffy , Poet Laureate, to protest the cuts to arts funding in the UK.  I won't be there.  Pardon my French, but why shouldn't poetry also face its share of cuts during an austere time?  Many poets I know (including myself) are from relatively wealthy backgrounds or have jobs; many poetry publishers are connected to successful larger publishing houses; it is true that the cuts may lead to the closure of a few good smaller presses - but poets need to get a grip, I think. There are parts of society that need money far more.  So long as education and the NHS are facing massive cuts, I for one cannot march demanding more money for poetry.  Uniquely among the arts, poetry is almost free to write.  All one needs is a pencil and paper.  Also, like never before, publication is basically free, too.  Blogs are free, and e-books very cheap.  What is really being protested i...

The news that the severe arts-funding cuts of the Tory-led British government have led to the Poetry Book Society (established by the Arts Council in 1953 by TS Eliot ) losing all its funding have set up howls of rage and surprise from Britain's best and brightest poetry lovers.  Meanwhile, same perplexed poets have noted on Facebook, with something akin to rebel-Libyan rage, that commercial behemoth Faber and Faber have been given £40,000. There is an irony here - the PBS is about as establishment as one can get in British poetry - it awards the TS Eliot Prize that often goes to Faber poets ( Walcott this year for instance), and which, if any organisation does, brings poetry to "poetry lovers" in the UK.  I don't belong to the organisation, for reasons that it would seem mean-spirited to mention now - one doesn't kick a horse when it is down, unless one wants to upset a philosopher.  Yet, I think it is a part of the landscape one wouldn't want to see go. ...

We have all noticed this, but somehow, inexorably, we don't stop it - the definition of a dream that is a nightmare: the very financial system that brought the West to the brink of collapse has now generated the crisis-as-excuse (national debt) that leads to the election of ever-more extreme right-wing, libertarian, and pro-capitalist parties and politicians - in the UK, Cameron-Clegg , in the USA, Tea Partyers to the Congress, to thwart the shellacked Barack .  Capitalism perpetuates itself, a cancer. I offer no immediate or short-term solutions, but it seems clear to me that the only way out of this circular mess is to break the cycle - we need a new system of governance and economic distribution.  Such a shift is epochal - think the Medieval Age moving into the Renaissance, the Renaissance into the Industrial Age of modernity - eggs got broken, millions died or suffered, empires collapsed, whole ways of life became extinct.  That sort of upheaval has to happen, surel...

The first great UK political anthology of 2010 is shaping up to be Alan Morrison 's Emergency Verse .  There is still time to submit.  Protest against this Coalition of the savage-in-a-suit.  Apologies to the savages.

The new Coalition government in Britain is a Thatcherite project by another name, as can now be seen - with its main goal to make the State wither away - the total opposite of the Marxist aim of having Capitalism dissolve.  As such, it is a purely market-driven (and ideological) construct, no matter how liberal or fair it claims to be.  There is something thrilling and caustic, being in the hands of such clearly driven engineers.  But also dangerous.  Many people will be hurt by this, and some corporations not enough.  To attempt to replace government spending with export as a large chunk of the economy in three years is wildly ambitious.  Canada did it in the 90s.  And turned sharply right ever after.  33 years after The Sex Pistols (as poet  Tony Lewis-Jones has reminded me) we all have something to shout about again.

This is a Burke vs. Paine moment. The recent shattering of windows in the greedy Scottish banker's mansion may be momentarily thrilling - but as Burke observed, you don't rebuild a house by knocking it down. The plans afoot, to storm the City banks next week, timed to coincide with Obama 's visit to London, are entirely misguided. One does not pelt a pilot with stale buns during a crash landing. The time to restructure the capitalist system is tomorrow. And slowly. Today we should be speaking and planning, together, how to locate a globally-sustaining ideology, or system, to allow for the world to continue managing the many forces straining against each other. Yes, we need to enter into a post-capitalist world. I am a post-capitalist. However, radicalism in the streets should not be simply a wasted resource. Best to conserve that radicalism for a revolution of minds. Put it in writing, not through someone's window pane.

Ed Balls , a top British politician with a background in economics, claims this current financial crisis is the "worst" recession in 100 years (since 1909 in other words) - and may prove more global than the Depression of the Thirties. Apart from this being upsetting news for us all - how does this relate to poetry? Well, notice that Poundian poetic modernism (itself perhaps a red herring - modernism begins with Pater arguably) and imagism - the strike against the Georgian style - begins around 1910. That's 100 years of Anglo-British modernism and anti-modernism, played out against capitalism as a dominant form of ideology - often in struggle with communism or socialism. 2009 marks a break with those narrative struggles, surely. Can poets begin to forge new poetics? New ways of using language? Or will they return to the comforts and challenges of older forms, themselves potentially radical? Will the poetry of the next 30 years be as engaged with culture, society, a...

This is, perhaps ominously, the 1,221st post at Eyewear - perhaps apt for a 21st century blog reporting on the worst economic crisis of the postmodern period . Indeed, there's an argument to be made that, since Britain is now about to enter a period of economic slump not seen since the austerity years of 1945 (according to the IMF), this first decade of the new century ends, ushering in a new era - one curiously mixed in outlook: exciting because Americans seem about to renew themselves, but dire as the world grinds to a halt. Will 2010-2019 be the decade of Green fightback, as we address the climate and remake the market economy in the new image of Obama? Or is this a new Great Depression, Mark II?

Sad news . Woolworths, the original "five and dime" store, and one of my earliest childhood memories (buying red licorice there) has gone bust. The UK is entering a new phase, then, of its economic crisis.

Prime Minister Brown's rescue plan for the banks, and wider economy, was hailed, as recently as a few days ago, by media pundits and Nobel prize winners alike; at the start of this week, shares seemed to rise, and hope gave way to genuine optimism. Unfortunately, three days later, all is not so well . Not only does it seem that Brown's expensive plan was a finger holding back a sea of trouble, but that financial institutions no longer have the confidence to even be bailed out. If last night's dramatic stock plummets continue today, we'll be back to roughly where we were last week, end of this one - down 20%, or more. Meanwhile, as the world economy grinds to a halt, the world faces a severe downturn. This is worrisome news. No one is out of the woods, Bretton or otherwise, yet.

It seems to be official. If a stock market crash is a 20% fall over a few days, then that's what this is. Meanwhile, pundits now compare the US election campaign to that of the Depression-era, between Hoover and Roosevelt . An air of unreality still hangs over these unfolding times, though.

This is Eyewear 's 1,101 th post. Today is the worst day since records began, in 1984, for the London FTSE 100. That is, in London's City, today's stock market "crashed" more severely than in 1987, or post-9/11. Meanwhile, Iceland may be going bankrupt, according to the BBC. What's ahead? Alistair Darling may cancel Christmas. How should poets react? Will there be a turn to "Thirties"-style poetry? More, or less, engaged, with the "world"? Separate from poetics, I'm concerned this is turning into a major global crisis that will not simply right itself in a year or so.