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

The TLS (NB, September 29) has weighed in on my recent anthology for nthposition, Babylon Burning: 9/11 five years after . The commentary opens: "We are puzzled by the notion, current since the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, that people resort to poetry in times of emotional distress. Poets and others of sound mind have suggested this as evidence of poetry's continuing 'relevance'. What happened to reading poetry for pleasure? Nothing could be more relevant than that." J.C. at NB then goes on to excerpt poems from Joe Ross , Tony Lewis-Jones , Pauline Michel (Canada's poet laureate), Ken Edwards and bill blissett [sic]. I am also described as "Mr Swift, a kindly fellow" for my suggestion to donate to the Red Cross. It seems an odd approach, both mildly humorous but also quizzical. Surely the idea that poetry is chiefly intended to give "pleasure" is old hat? Or rather, given that poetry is a complex art form tha...

I have a review of Leonard Cohen's latest collection of poems, Book of Longing , online at Northern Poetry Review . http://www.northernpoetryreview.com/

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Fortner Anderson (pictured) to its pages this Friday. Known for the performances of his poems, read a cappella, he has been an active member of the Montreal "spoken word" scene for years prior to the use of the term "spoken-word". In June of 2002, he was invited to Genoa, Italy to open the 8th edition of the Genoa International Poetry Festival. In February of 2004 he was a featured performer at the Festival Voix D'ameriques in Montreal reading works in English and French. In November of 2004 he was a featured reader at the «10° mondes parallèlles» festival in Lilles, France. He is a co-founder and a producer with the audio publishing venture Wired On Words (wiredonwords.com), and participated in the development of the Ultimatum II Urban Poetry Festival of 1985. He is the host of a radio show, Dromostexte, a one-hour show which plays only poems and spoken word recordings, heard each week on CKUT-FM (www.ckut.ca). His past proj...

Life Lines: 7 Poets for Oxfam Autumn Poetry Reading Tuesday 26th September, 7-10 pm Hosted by Todd Swift & James Byrne Since 1980 Elaine Feinstein has lived as a full-time writer. In the same year, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has written fourteen novels, five biographies and radio plays, television dramas. In 1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. She has been a Writer in Residence for the British Council in Singapore. Her Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her biography of Anna Akhmatova, Anna of All The Russias , was published in July 2005. James Fenton was Oxford Professor of Poetry for the period 1994-1999. He has won several major awards, including The Whitbread Award for Poetry. He has worked as political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondent, foreign correspondent, and is presently a col...

To say that Brian De Palma's film The Black Dahlia is all style and no substance is like saying water's all wet. The film is a virtual wet dream - whose thematic binary systems of fire and ice, body and no-body (or dismembered corpse), girl and girl, boy and good-girl, boy and bad-girl, cop and cop, voyeur and victim, are seamlessly sutured in to the filmic reverie with premeditated sadistic glee. De Palma pries from the robbed grave of Hitchcock's body of work what he can - he is a master of the Oedipal drama and the trajectory that fingers the audience - our watching such visual excess is our culpability - we are the doers ourselves. The screeching crow on the cut-up corpse in the final scene of TBD is the spider in the skull at the end of Psycho - the unsaid shock image that is the last nail in the scopophiliac's coffin. TBD is not a good movie. It may not even be a movie at all - in the traditional sense of having been written and structured to offer comfortab...

Eyewear thinks Noir is the major film genre. Eyewear thinks Brick has dusted it off for a new generation. You did good, Rian. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0393109/quotes

Who says poetry doesn't have efficacy in the real world? Some extraordinary sales figures in today from Oxfam's Su Lycett - Life Lines: Poets for Oxfam , launched just a few months ago, in June 2006, has already sold around 5,000 copies, and made £10,000 in profit (around $20,000 USD) for Oxfam. That translates into clean running water for 14,000 people, or equipment for five schools, or livestock for eight farms. With National Poetry Month coming this October, and then the Christmas sales season, there is every expectation the CD (which I edited on a volunteer basis) will sell even more. The nearly-70 major and emerging poets involved also donated their time and poems, and publishers donated their rights. The list of contributors reads like a virtual who's who of UK poetry, across a broad spectrum, from mainstream, to performance, to avant-garde. This will surely make it one of the most successful poetry CDs (let alone anthologies) of its kind, ever. The CD is now availab...