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

Eyewear likes to celebrate its seasonal book launches at the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury, London - one of the legendary and best bookshops in the UK. If you wish to attend our October 24th event, at 7pm - 9pm  please rsvp to: info at eyewearpublishing dot com - admission is free, all welcome, and we offer free wine or water. This book signing/ drinks reception, with brief readings, will feature the following authors: Gary Lachman (Occult expert, writer and Rock n Roll Hall of famer) and Colin Stanley (Wilson expert, novelist and poet) - who wrote the introductory essay for, and annotated the edition of, respectively, the acclaimed Colin Wilson reprint, Eagles & Earwigs Brian Jabas Smith - writer, singer-songwriter, journalist, in from Arizona Rebecca Close - over from Barcelona to accept her £1,500 Melita Hume prize selected by Vahni Capildeo Ken Evans - in from Manchester to launch his riveting debut Alex Wylie - our very own editor read...

Every two weeks a fortunate poet wins £140 - 14 poets get shortlisted, and one selected the winner... the winner's poem appears at this blog, along with their bio and photo... and the best poems from the shortlist become an anthology in time... Here we go... Shortlist for the FORTNIGHT PRIZE, NUMBER ONE, May 3-17   1.     ASHLEY-ELIZABETH BEST, ‘Alignment’ (Canada) 2.     AUDREY MOLLOY, ‘A Gradual Eden’ (Ireland) 3.     CLAIRE CROWTHER, ‘Pets Don’t feel Pity’ (UK) 4.     EMILY OSBORNE, ‘Brute Facts’ (Canada) 5.     ERIC SIGLER, ‘The Panther’ (USA) 6.     FRANCINE WITTE, ‘Charley Explains Baseball To Me’ (USA) 7.     GLEN WILSON, ‘Rented Flat’ (Ireland) 8.     IAN DUDLEY, ‘President’ (UK) 9.     KATE NOAKES, ‘Edward’s Memory’ (France/UK) 10. MARC BRIGHTSIDE, ‘Influence-A’ (UK) 11. ...

Eyewear will be announcing its various shortlists for the Hume, winner of the Sexton, and 50 participants in the 2017 anthology of best new Irish and British poetry, all in October.... And, we launch 5 new poetry collections at the world-famous Bloomsbury book shop, THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS bookshop... Tuesday, 4 October, 7-9 pm, by these poets... BEN PARKER TERESE SVOBODA MARIA APICHELLA ALICE ANDERSON TONY CHAN and we have 4 poets reading at the SCOTTISH POETRY LIBRARY  on National Poetry Day at 6 pm, in Edinburgh, 6th October: GEORGE E CLARKE, POET LAUREATE OF CANADA MARION MCCREADY PAUL DEATON TERESE SVOBODA Then, our director will be reading soon after... more about that later....

Announcing the Shortlist for the 2016 Sexton Prize September 13, 2016  /  By Kelly Davio Eyewear Publishing is pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2016 Sexton Prize. The finalists are, in no particular order, as follows: THE BARBAROUS CENTURY, Leah Umansky HISTORY OF GONE, Lynn Schmeidler SEVERE CLEAR, Maya Catherine Popa GIMME THAT. DON’T SMITE ME, Steve Kronen SCHEHERAZADE AND OTHER REDEPLOYMENTS, David McAleavey AN AMERICAN PURGATORY, Rebecca Gayle Howell SIT IN THE DARK WITH ME, Jesse Lee Kercheval The shortlist was selected by Eyewear’s Director Todd Swift with Senior Editor Kelly Davio. Don Share of Poetry Magazine will select the winning manuscript, which will be released at the 2017 AWP conference in Washington, D.C. The winner will be announced in October.  Congratulations to our finalists! 

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...

EYEWEAR'S POET PENNY BOXALL WINS £20,000 FOR THE BIENNIAL EDWIN MORGAN POETRY AWARD FOR SHIP OF THE LINE ! WE ARE OVER THE MOON!

HO HO HO IT'S TIME TO ROCK AROUND THE CHRISTMAS TUBE RIDE HOME AGAIN Ho ho ho - all Eyewear book titles are now 35% OFF UNTIL DECEMBER 15 (last day we can guarantee delivery more or less on time with our skeleton crew of cheery Elves) - code is JingleBooks !!!!

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...

Folks, Eyewear has given you years of daily pleasure for almost a decade.  Time to pay for those cheap, indeed, free, thrills: with a t-shirt that costs less than a movie, or a good Indian take-away.  Yes, that's right, Eyewear now has T-shirts available with our cool logo - in small, medium, large and extra-large sizes.  Be the first kid on your block to wear the ultra-hip, savvy and post-ironic heavy cotton fruit of the loom garment that indicates you are a proud Eyewearer! We could have used an eye-catching model but asked Martin Penny to wear the shirt instead

PhD student and poet Henry King has written an intelligent comment on his blog about the Swift-Bonney fracas of late.  He makes an extremely important point about my trying to keep a space open for poetries, poetics, and styles, that resist the full demands of one kind of late modernist avant-gardism, practiced by a small group of mainly British Marxist poets.  Almost any other sort of broad-minded person would recognise my work as falling, on the broad spectrum, closer to Donald Allen than Allen Tate - my recent book launch was supported by a third gen New York School Poet, David Lehman , and arguably the UK's leading British avant-garde poet, Denise Riley , my friend and mentor. My own work combines an interest in the disrupted lyric and abstract lyricism.  In America, I have edited a section for New American Writing, and also been published several times in Jacket.  In short, I am hardly a "mainstream" poet in the sense that, say, Sean O'Brien is. Indeed, my...

I've been getting some eye-opening comments, from readers like Paul Sutton , who find Eyewear inane.  Perhaps.  But another way to read it is as an ephemeral grab-bag of posts featuring poetry reviews, pop culture, and random musings, that, every so often, takes risks, and does good work.  I agree - some of the posts are blog-worthy only (it is a blog).  However, there are numerous featured poets, and reviewers, who share their work on here as well.  I admit to having fun, sometimes, by being banal.  Like everyone else, I live in a media-saturated world, of scandalous trials, dead movie stars, and James Bond.  Between the inanity, I hope, readers can squint enough to catch a glimmer, if even rarely, of more valid, and valuable work.  Not all of it self-directed.  Though, as Mr. Sutton et al. should be aware, almost all writers now keep blogs, or web sites, where they inform readers of their doing  - with the decline of marketing budget...

Eyewear gets around 3,000 pageviews a day, on a good day.  On a bad one, closer to 1,500.  Okay - so, here's a question for you - why does almost no one leave their comments?  This absence is depleting the value of the blog, I feel, and leading me to, again, think of shutting shop, or eye, as it were.  COMMENT PLEASE!  There, I've shouted it.  Cheers.

they want Eyewear Books for Crimbo! I am raising a trial balloon - shall we call it a trial lunette? If I was to start a small press for full poetry collections would any of you out there be interested in submitting your manuscripts?  I'd appreciate queries, or tentative offers of collections to consider - send them to me at toddswift at clara dot co uk, with the subject line reading EYEWEAR PRESS HYPOTHETICAL QUERY LETTER. If anyone wants to volunteer their talents to help such a start-up, especially with design, lay-out, marketing, web design, and proof-reading, also contact me. For now, this may just be a mirage.  But I am keen to see what sort of interest there might be.

Eyewear would like to congratulate Canadian poet Janet Vickers , whose poem has been selected from the many sent to Irish poet and judge of this year's competition, Barbara Smith . Smith was a recent reader at the Oxfam Spring into Poetry event in London. A first collection, Kairos , was published in 2007. Her work has been shortlisted and awarded prizes, such as at Scotland’s Wigtown Poetry Competition 2009 and the Basil Bunting Award. She is hard at work on the 'dreaded' second collection, forthcoming in 2011. Barbara Smith, Judge of the 2011 Eyewear Poetry Prize The winning poem is below.  Smith writes: "t has been a real privilege reading the work of so many varied poets for the Eyewear competition: the styles, the approaches, the wit and humour – all of this and more in the mix. In the final weighing there were quite a few gems that made it into the basket for choosing from, but the one that I felt fitted best – both in terms of the ‘six’ and the bl...

Well, here we are.  Six years on, the little blog that could keeps chugging along.  It's a bit antiquated now, this blogging thing.  Facebook updates, tweets, and god-knows-what-else, all seem to have replaced blogs.  Tin cans and string may be next.  Anyway, I never planned this to last so long, over thousands of posts, many of them from guest bloggers and poets from across the world. What keeps me going?  Firstly, the world keeps happening, and the news remains fascinating on any given day; secondly, poems and poetry face new perils and new prospects in the face of a technologically-driven society that both welcomes "content" but skews more and more to games and freely-downloaded songs and podcasts.  The media is more and more going for audiovisual content, not text, though texting continues to be attractive.  And poetry, of course, can do audiovisual, when it wants; thirdly, life keeps throwing out its challenges, and I find this a good spac...

Eyewear will be six in June, the six month. Send new unpublished poems in English to toddswift at clara dot co uk marked Eyewear Poetry as word docs. One poem per poet. Poems should be no longer than 36 lines long, and use the word six in the poem. The competition will be judged by Irish poet Barbara Smith , a regular contributor to Eyewear. First prize will be £6 and publication online at Eyewear. Open to everyone in the world. Submissions must be received no later than the last day in June by midnight.

The Internet doesn't really work for selling poetry, or does it?  Or is it just me?  Eyewear has hundreds of followers, loyal readers, and other lurkers - and has served a community with diligence for more than half a decade.  So - what happened when, almost a week ago, I asked for one person - anyone, anywhere, in wintertime - to buy the lone copy of Winter Tennis, at Amazon.com - so that this year my sales statement would read 1, not nil?  Well, what happened, is, nada.  No one decided to put Eyewear out of its misery, and buy the damn copy.  No units moved.  No sale.  Sucka.  This really peeves me.  The Internet is a place for giving and taking, freely - for grazing animals.  When it comes to putting money where one's mouth is, forgetaboutit.  I want to see this book sold by Valentine's Day, or Eyewear  gets it.

Around 20 years ago - when I was a young man in my early 20s, and an avid film-goer - a curious cultural event happened - Sixties horn-rimmed glasses became cool.  A mini-genre emerged, roughly between 1988 and 1992, which, in this five year period, created some of the best American films - The Civil Rights movie.  Perhaps it starts with classic redneck vs. G-man Mississippi Burning , which features a startlingly young Willem Defoe as a buttoned-up Kennedy-boy FBI man and a brilliantly simmering Gene Hackman , in perhaps his finest role other than the French Connection films. Defoe wears the specs here.  Then came 1991's masterwork, JFK , Oliver Stone 's own conspiracy-theory Citizen Kane/Rashomon , which retells the Kennedy assassination and general 60s paranoia, from the perspective of Kevin Costner (never better), as Jim Garrison.   Finally, Malcolm X , with Denzel Washington , appeared in 1992, and here, Spike Lee 's great biopic does not spare us th...

286 followers!   Eyewear is growing.  Let's aim for 300 by March!  Onward....

Eyewear has reached 275 followers status (more from various other feeds in fact).  Hurrah!