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

You've seen it here first: the new Oxfam National Poetry poster. I helped commission and create it, working with Oxfam's Business Development Team, as the Oxfam-poet-in-residence. This is part of the "Make Poverty History" campaign, and starts the next phase of Oxfam-poetry projects we're developing for 06-07. The poster goes up in the 100 or so used books shops that make Oxfam the biggest such retailer in Europe. More to the point, it features a donated poem from the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion (a great honour). It also presents cover images from some of the collections that pass through our doors and into the hands of poetry-lovers everywhere. Careful observation will yield a pleasant surprise in the top left corner. Make Poetry History!

Kennys Bookstore (to the right) is perhaps the most famous and eccentric independent book shop in Ireland - Brendam Behan read there, along with many other legends (every Irish author worth their salt has read there and some Yanks too) - and now the Galway institution is closing; or what may be worse, going all virtual. I read at Kennys for the launch of one of my recent collections (the pints after blur the memory) - actually, it was, oddly, the day after my wedding. Flushed and well-dressed, I read for a good crowd. Mr. Kenny himself sat there puffed up in a three-pice suit at a huge desk in the middle of one of the rooms where books were on sale - slitting open letters with a pen-knife and gruffly answering the old black phone as browsers shifted around him, like some Kubla Kane of Books. I found a copy of Map-Maker's Colours , the first anthology I co-edited, when I was 19-20, with the Belfast poet Martin Mooney . The reading was fun - read with Kevin Higgins . My photo was...

I am interviewing Al Alvarez tomorrow (he is pictured here beside me, at the Oxfam poetry event I organized to feature him earlier this year) at his home. Al Alvarez - poet, anthologist, critic, and great friend to poets - has long been one of my favourite literary figures and an inspiration - so I am quite honoured that one of London's most respected literary magazines, Magma , invited me to conduct the interview for their latest issue, out this December. In October, Books In Canada will be running my long review of Alvarez's latest book of criticism, The Writer's Voice .

I can now report that my work is included in eratio postmodern poetry issue six, fall 2005 http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com reader and writer do look this one up - it is edited by the fine poet Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

NEW AMERICAN WRITING / 369 Molino Avenue / Mill Valley, CA 94941 Dear Friend of New American Writing: Because we are currently receiving less than $1 per issue of the magazine’s “sell-through” at Barnes & Noble and Borders, which unfortunately dominate the bookstore trade and use a heavy hand with small providers such as literary magazines, it’s urgent that we reduce our reliance on income from those chains and thus also our distributor, Ingram Periodicals. If we are not able to do so, we will be forced financially to cease publication of a magazine that has existed since 1971. Therefore, we ask you to order the magazine directly from us using the following methods: (1) Purchasing a three-issue subscription for $27, a savings of $1 per annual issue. To do so, send a check to the address above. If you wish to use a credit card, order through our website: http://newamericanwriting.com . (2) Purchasing individual issues as they appear from the same address, by check or by credit card ...

Another day - another anthology. So sighs the world-weary professional poetry editor (I am currently trying to meet a deadline for my sixth anthology, due next week at the publishers in Canada). And yet, they serve a purpose - they serve notice. They demand that certain poets are noticed. In Britain, where debut collections are cruelly limited, both by perhaps overly conservative standards, and rigorous market concerns (with less arts funding than, say, in Canada), very few good poets get their own books out, and the battle is always on to draw attention to those who should be so published. So, this anthology, The Like Of It , promises to highlight with a very strong marker some exceptionally gifted younger poets who - in a just, stylish, poetry-smart and less po-faced society - would all already have first or second books. It is thus a needed as well as superb offering. I should add I know most of these poets, having met them over my last few years in London. I am glad to have met ...

The T.S. Review is like ly to exhaust some of its critical goodwill by revealing that one of its absurd guilty pleasures is that it uncritically loves Simple Minds . The aformentioned band had its greatest moment exactly 20 years ago (1985), when its uncharacteristic anthem to teenage love, Don't You (Forget About Me) was America's number one song for what seemed that entire summer. It had been featured in the John Hughes classic The Breakfast Club . There tend to be snickers and ironic winks in the U.K., but it is possible to argue that Simple Minds were, simply, the biggest UK alternative rock band of the 80s in the U.S. (discounting Depeche Mode which is a different and somewhat later story) which is no mean achievement ( U2 is excluded for being Irish, of course), especially when one considers how difficult Oasis and Robbie Williams have found the search for a U.S. top ten position, let alone number one with a bullet. At any rate, the song from the Hughes film has e...