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

  POEM FOR MY MOTHER   I have not done justice to my mother, The sweep of her life, How when young, she was young, In a country, on a farm, and other children, And I will never know their names, I have forgotten to ask so much, How lazy have I been! Now that she is going, Out of this room, where we can see her, Where she can be talked with, now that she is Leaving the scene of all our disputations, All the tomfoolery of this world, and the music She listened to, her cooking, her reading, Her studies at McGill, those meticulously marked Textbooks, the kisses, the childbirth, the sons, Jordan, the colds, the flying to China, The mourning, lovemaking, waking to make instant Coffee, the long discussions about serial killers, About our ancestors, about Uncle Sandy and Port Daniel, the summers, the winters, the cross-country Skiing, the wedding photos, the modelling career, The rages, the laughing, sometimes, the criticism Of certain TV ...

On the value of reading during a global pandemic Though it save no life passes time that could be wasted w ith Money Heist or Tiger King on Netflix; or fear or breaking the law with walking twice the same day. To read is to return to somewhere never gone or only in memory; it is a home abroad, a power without pain. Libraries are banks that never drain away their fiscal strength; a book is a mile of miles at a single length. You may start Sir Browne and die before the Urne ; no holiday ends too late; life is brevity, reading infinite. We skim the stone of ourselves upon the surface of time like a meteor burning as it skips the skin of space. We hold a place to return again. But even entering the waves once permits the wetting sea to begin.  Death is omnipresent, gasping at medics like a vicious shark; they lean in to serve, are swallowed themselves by dark. Though lovers break orders to couple danger in the park. Open any volume, intak...

I am exploring a neo-romantic style of poem, simpler and more expressive, of late, partially inspired by recent German writers, and the events that have changed the world as much or more than the French revolution. Here is a new poem in this style. I saw my first flower today not only of this spring but ever as this time my eye saw at once what might never be seen later if I might die the next day as the time is fast coming of a blight so the red rippling flew out at me like a wild thing so enraged with living it seemed no cage could keep such a tiger in. ts 26 March, 2020 London

I have been having terrible dreams of late; woke up last night at 5 am, and wrote this... it is a rougher draft (fourth this morning) but wanted to share it with you... Night Mares Each night I wake in sweat and fear to sense my own godhead cruelly near. The beasts and fates my chafing soul breeds in Lethe let out of stables foaming manticores no saddle brakes, no bridle slows. We run a gamut of gross nightish shows to bolt in darkness crying for any light. Our uncivil dreams prove the world mad if unmade or made by us. I lie down in peace and rise in fright to recognise my mind a bad lover to me in our bed, doubling terror in one coupling head of woe. No god would make worlds as lost or wanton as my dreams become: so close they are in feeling thought to being thrown out far away from home. new poem by Todd Swift; March 5, 2013.

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” ...

The Language Of The Fan Twirled one way, or pushed to the lips, It means am engaged or a flirt . Frail coloured ribbed expanding toys Feel good in the hand as they grow Or close across the face, to cool, Convey, so one’s status displays By the fluttered discipline of a wrist; Otherwise, a dauphin might stoop to kiss A lady-in-waiting not a baroness; Mother-of-pearl; tusk; celluloid: The sticks upon which paper furls Are precious, even flammable – The whole fan might go up in one’s face – How you tap your cheek spreads disgrace. new poem by Todd Swift July 2012

Whereabouts for JulietPoyntz (1886-1937) You deliver envelopes you must under no circumstances open to men whose names you never ask in hotel lobbies in Baltimore, Copenhagen, Shanghai… No one you know has seen you in three years. On a New York street you happen upon an old friend, you used to like to disagree with – those big opinioned, diner nights you can’t quite forget – talk over your new found disgust: the white-walled cells into which you’ve seen people you call ‘comrade’ one by one vanish to be kept awake all night and confess under extreme electric light. Over coffee you are full of the book you’re planning to write. Already evening. Earlier today, at a chateaux in central France, Edward married Mrs Simpson.   You leave your room at 353 West 57th Street to buy The New York Times or some Lucky Strike cigarettes. No luggage nor extra clothes. Behind you, everything you own. A solitary candle still burni...

  Childs Hill Six months later out of the womb for eight hours and you're gone. I'm sorry I was late at Gatwick but I couldn't hit eject ... (our Starman days, they're gone, correct?) and stop the jet's petrol-blasting taxi nor advance in the queue for a taxi with sincere words—"Please, my nephew is dead". They don't believe me; after all, they've just read in flight about who fucked who and whether Rooney's bicycle kick came off his shin or "he done laced it!" This isn't London any more but a mobile with a tether to every other sputtering machine. . . The casket was painfully light at Golders Green. London, May 2012 poem by Umit Singh Dhuga, Classics scholar with a PhD from Columbia.  He is the founder, publisher, and managing editor of The  Battersea Review .   Ben Mazer is co-editor.

Upon Waking with an Editorial Hangover Some think that meter's had its bloody turn, and that it should be buried in Keats' urn. They feel that the experiments of Shelley do nothing to assault the nerves to jelly. They'd gladly give up struggling through Lord Byron, prefer by far the simple prose of Styron. Milton stops their blood and turns it cold, while Wordsworth on his mountaintops seems old. Even when it's roughened as in Ransom, it is the New York Times that sets them dancin'. While there are those who read the avant-garde, excited that its formlessness is hard for nearly everyone to understand; like hungry wolves they travel in a band and howl with vital passion at the moon, finding in chaos beauty and a tune. While I am neither for it or against it, and call on language only as I've sensed it. It seems I take my language as I find it; mine is the more progressive form of blinded. I am reborn -- unmetered -- lacking form; I'll find my i...