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

FOR ST PATRICK'S DAY, EYEWEAR IS VERY GLAD TO REPRISE THIS BLOG POST ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 15 2011. Eyewear is delighted to feature Paul Muldoon .  Muldoon (pictured here as a young man) is, in my opinion, the most significant poet from Ireland and Britain born since 1950.  This is his 60th year.  His style - witty, linguistically complex, musical, allusive, and filled with puns - is the most rhythmically original since Lowell' s and Auden 's.  He is the funniest Irish writer of genius since Flann O'Brien ; and the most alert to language's depths since Heaney and Joyce . He has developed a way of patterning words and images by alluding to myth, legend, and also personal experience, employing a syntax that is playful and sometimes mesmeric.  He might be the most verbally seductive of poets since Swinburne .  His influence is apparent on a whole generation of poets, and the work of, say, Don Paterson , is unimaginable without the Muldoon template ...

Eyewear is thoroughly chuffed to feature the superb American poet Kathleen Ossip (pictured above) this rainy London Friday, by showcasing three new poems of hers.   Ossip is the author of The Cold War , which was named one of Publishers Weekly 's best books of 2011; The Search Engine , which was selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics , a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, the Washington Post, The Believer, Fence , and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School and online for The Poetry School in London. She was a co-founder of LIT (the journal of the graduate writing program at The New School), and she's the poetry editor of Women's Studies Quarterly . She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.   3 Poems from “The Great Man” ...

Eyewear is very glad to feature a poem today from James Franco 's new chapbook, a UK exclusive. James Franco, American Poet BLUE BEING by James Franco There is a surface That we all make together And the wild man Seems to pop through Like a line dancer out of step And others start complaining That he doesn’t know the moves And he’s stepping on everyone’s toes. There was a man named Mike Who called my father five times a day. You’d hear each burdened voice of the family Shout across the house, Daaad, it’s Mike. At dinner my father often explained That Mike saw demons. They spoke to him, He thought they were real. I pictured a flaming blue being Entering the dingy room, And sitting by Mike On the gray sheeted bed. 'Blue Being' is from James Franco's chapbook, Strongest of the Litter , and appears courtesy of Hollyridge Press . ...

Mr. Casaubon Regrets  “You’d rather read a book than talk to me.”                                                 -- ex-wife to the author  “It’s nothing personal, my dear, But books are always different And you’re not.” David C Ward David C. Ward is an historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian institution where he has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman , Abraham Lincoln , and 2010’s award winning “Hide/Seek. Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” His poetry has been published in PN Review and other venues; his little collection Internal Difference was published by Lintott/Carcanet in 2011. On October 12, 2012, Ward will open “Poetic Likeness. Modern American Poets” at the Portrait Gallery. I...