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

Americans have a uniquely terrible president currently and unless they are careful he may win a second election. Even 8 years of Trump is dispiriting and damaging but eventually and soonish he will be gone. He may yet be impeached. The UK is less lucky by far. Here we face a terrible disruption that is likely to last a generation or more. If we are fortunate we may recover by 2050. This disruption is the Hydra-headed Brexit dilemma. If it goes through the UK will be far poorer culturally, economically and politically. And the union may break up, with conflict again on a more divided Irish island. If it fails to go through there may well be a terminal decline in mainstream democracy and a further rise in more extreme forms of populism. This is because the middle ground has been hollowed out and the far Left and far Right stand by to fill the vacuum and exploit the claims that democracy died when Brexit was not delivered. At the most optimistic, Britain will become a low tax ha...

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...

EYEWEAR PUBLISHING EDITORIAL POLICY 2017 Eyewear is a privately-funded company. Its chief aim is literary – to discover, nurture, and publish, significant and interesting new and established writers and poets, across all languages, and all genres. We do so by holding our editorial team to the highest standards of professionalism and integrity; and by ensuring our printing is environmentally sustainable. We actively seek diversity of representation, and opinion, in our editorial choices, and align ourselves with no one political party, or movement. We are, in most things, radically moderate. At the moment, our ideal political leaders would be Justin Trudeau in Canada, Angela Merkel in Germany. As a rule, our editors do not believe Brexit is in the best interests of the UK, and we remain deeply concerned about the direction America is taking under its new leadership. We are on record as welcoming refugees to the UK. Our publications try to build bridges between cultures and co...

MAY DAY FOR SOME IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT TOBACCO, ALCOHOL AND PROBABLY FIREARMS Did you Maypole dance today in an English custom going back to at least the time of The Wicker Man ? No? There is always next year. Today marked the day that the Hollywood ending promised for LCFC did not quite happen - but they played one of the most tense and watched matches of the season against a stronger-than-expected Manchester Utd side, perhaps not wanting a triumphant Foxes on their hallowed ground.  Here is hoping Leicester still becomes the 5,000-1 winners.  The 20 or so remaining bets on them to win the season, none higher than £20, could yield as much as a hundred thousand quid in a few weeks time.  Not bad work, backing utter underdogs. While Eyewear has been away, lots has happened - we were in LA for AWP, London for the LBF, and recently had a great review for Mel Pryor in the latest Poetry Review , and another for A Public Woman by Benno Barnard , in a speci...

SHE WAS A SPY The new UK Spy bill being mooted - see here - is unacceptable, and yes, will out people's private browsing habits, which are more personal and potentially embarrassing or damaging than we might care to admit, as a society. Simply put, a large percentage of the British public uses the Internet to do one or more of the following: a) cheat on a spouse or partner; b) look at (legal) porn; c) look at (illegal) porn; d) read up about suicide or mental illness or some other illness they may wish hidden; e) illegally pirate/ download American TV shows; f) pirate music, books, movies; g) explore other odd, eccentric or very personal hobbies or obsessions. If the government is able to collect the data exhibiting this behaviour, and if it is gathered, and then perhaps hacked, or simply used by their own unscrupulous intelligence agencies, mass harm to the society would ensue. This is because you could easily blackmail anyone in politics or any position of authority to...

THE BETTER PUBLISHER I have discovered the secret to publishing success: print money. Seriously, the success of a publishing house is directly connected to the following statement: if you publish books people want to own and read, they will buy them from you.  If they buy them from you in large amounts (over a few thousand copies) you make a profit on initial expenses, and can also cover overhead costs, marketing, salaries, design, postage, etc. In short - if publishing as a business model is to be viable, the publishing company must produce goods/items/units/books that are in demand. The reason poetry presses fail, struggle, and generally require state or private funding (subventions) to survive, is because they underperform at generating sales revenue. In ugly words: poetry is something not in demand. Despite some big selling poetry titles every year, most poetry titles will sell between 50 and 800 copies - usually around 200. Very few sell more than 2000. A compa...

Of course, life goes on - there is dancing, and there are joyous occasions, and music and poetry etc - but forgive me for saying the last few days have been bleak, news-wise (leavened by the Trump buffoonery, arguably). The racist massacre in South Carolina, especially, is horrible. And leads on to inescapable conclusions about the Catch-22 America is in, with regards to its gun laws. In a lesser way, the doubts now hovering over our British Olympian, and all-around lovely guy, Mo Farah, are also troubling. And, in general, wars, terrorism, murder, and cruelty rage. And, my friend, a poet, died. Yes, yes, we must go on - but are we reaching a tipping point of savagery? A Wayward Pines style devolution of humanity? Perhaps not, but news of more nuclear weapons being deployed in Russia is again a symbol of bridges breaking down. I am not sure poetry is the solution to much or anything, except, in this small (and it may be small gestures that comfort us, now) way - cra...

TEN YEARS OF SAUCY PHOTOS OF PEOPLE WEARING GLASSES CAN YOU IMAGINE?! Ten years is a long time for a blog these days - any days. It may even be past its due date, as it were - but somehow, like some old dog in a cowboy flick, this blog lingers in the dust, wise, weak, and somehow sadder than sad, but there's a decency just in its continued tail wags and whimpers. Eyewear, the blog , has a claim to have made history. It is probably one of, if not the, longest-running poetry blogs in the UK, and surely has the most number of recorded visitor hits (over two million), and a large number of posts (over 3,300) - an average of 330 a year. It is also British Library archived, and is still widely read - most weeks, a good post will get a few hundred readers - though we seldom get long chains of comments. Eyewear has waded into most of the public and poetic and political controversies in the UK - and sometimes the USA or Canada - of the period 2005-2015. We've featured hundreds...

As we said yesterday here at this blog, it would likely emerge that the co-pilot was hiding an illness, or had been jilted, - as it turns out, both. In this case, which is one of mass-murder/suicide, the underlying illness seems to be depression. As a poetry blog, we are broadly sympathetic to the rights of anyone (including poets) suffering from the disability that is chronic depression - and our chief editor has written eloquently before in poems and posts about depression. Clearly, most depressed people do not commit murder - though a small but notable minority will go on to take their own lives.  Depression is often linked to a constellation of other personality disorders which might lead to mass murder, but again this is very rare. With treatment (usually medication and some form of therapy), almost all depressive conditions can be put into remission, as it were; but make no mistake, major depressive episodes can be nightmarishly debilitating, and commonly are associated w...

Eyewear the blog has long considered the aviation industry less safe than it could be. Of course the safest plane is one that stays on the ground, and some risk is always involved in lifting a ton of tin 36,000 feet into the sky. However, one thing has clearly become obvious today - one of the oldest myths about flying is now outmoded and needs to be replaced. Given that we now know the German plane was intentionally crashed into a mountainside by the young co-pilot, after he had locked the pilot out, and then gradually eased the plane into a gentle if fatal descent, we have to face a fact that is ugly: we are no longer safe to assume that pilots have our best interests at heart when we fly. It was once said that since no pilot wanted to die, every pilot who flew us up and down was obviously reassured of the safety of the plane and route being flown. Though accidents will and do happen, we counted on the expertise and glamour of the pilots to keep us aloft. But that is a feebl...